resignation

 

resignation as sorrow

resignation as joy

resignation as meaning

resignation as suffering

resignation in making peace

resignation with my lot

resignation in tempering want

resignation as my wont

i can consign myself to history

 

Will you please let us know?

 

I watched two incredible movies in the past couple of days. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink. Freddie is a man who cannot serve a master, but seems to want nothing more than to be able to do this. His wildly violent reactions to any criticism levelled at the master stands in contrast to his own frustrations with his methods. Barton Fink’s insincerity to his craft presents a powerful critique of the emptiness of producing art under capitalism. His common-man tourism proceeds while actively refusing to listen to the only common-man he knows. That he came to know him only because the man took kindly to Fink’s noise complaint highlights the writer’s disconnect from the subject he wants to exalt above all others.

Someone who “hates small talk” asked me the other day where I thought meaning came from. It reminded me of Marx’s quote about men making their own history without being able to do so as they please. The tradition of dead generations weighs most certainly like a nightmare on the brains of the living. What traditions weigh on me? I am not even in touch with all of them. My passport, driving license, and voter ID all have me down as being from a nothing village in the north of Kerala. There are traditions here I am well across, and ones I have never heard of. My history is inflicted on me in a way I am almost unaware, let alone having bargained for. It is hardly a tragedy, but as Emile Cioran once said, each of us do consider ourselves an unrecognised Job. So where does meaning come from? Calvin’s dad believes suffering builds character. Of course, this characterisation implies that one can be both with and without character, instead of the idea that character inheres in a person and can be subject to critique. What does it mean to be of sound character? Does it mean coming across well? Giving a good account of yourself? I love catching a sunrise. On a bright sunny day, I love the incredible explosion of colour that you see in this nothing town. When I am alone, I let most bugs scurry or flutter across the room. The bug spray is for when someone else is bothered. Is there meaning in letting a spider as big as my fist live in the bathroom?

I have been using this time of relative ease to immerse myself in other people’s creativity – primarily through cinema and literature. There is something extraordinarily meaningful in reading about lives lived incomprehensibly far away from you –in time and in space – and seeing yourself in their sorrows, worries, joys, and irrational frustrations. Wanting to curse at people who do not understand that there is a time and a place is apparently a sensation as old as time.

Is it the search for meaning that pushes people to join cults? Freddie moves from master to master in search of meaning, exiting in fantastic incidents of self-destruction. I do not think I can say he finds meaning in the end, but he does as he does, and he appears not unhappy. There is but one thing that makes sense to him, and one occasion where he knows what he is doing. I know not what to make of it except to say he seems to have figured at least one more thing than me.

I, too, cannot deny the charge of looking for meaning just about anywhere. Even an elusive search for the right combination of hairstyle and beard is in some way an attempt to find me, my essence. Easy for me to say I am more than the different specificities that I present. I am, however, also not less than their sum. It reminds me of the occasional query about why I go by Mishal over Mohammad. It was not really my choice, as most people know, but I would never switch. Mohammad carries with it all the historical baggage of a name that I have spent twenty-five years not being. I prefer a two-syllable name too. Mohammad is, perhaps, a rather loaded name for this exercise; one that lends itself to deliberate overlooking. Nevertheless, I do not think I would be the same person if I had lived my twenty-five years as Mohammad and not Mishal. Mohammad is a part of what makes me, but it is even more a part of what makes ‘not me.’ Mohammad, I think, would be serving a different master. Not that I know the master I serve now; I have nothing to report, nothing to let you know.  

Jealousy Manifest

 

A man is walking down a tree-lined street close to his flat – his third walk of the day. Wearing an elegant-looking trench coat completely unsuited for the cold, his hands shiver in his pockets. His mind, however, is elsewhere. The look of consternation of his face suggests that just like the two previous walks, little by way of relaxation has been achieved so far. He looks as if he is hurrying towards something. He is not. If anything, he might be trying to get away. From what exactly, we are not sure he could say. What is certain is that tension is palpable in the pacing.

He stops. He stares at a duck. It is an unremarkable looking duck, ugly even. The man keeps looking at it. The duck, in turn, also stops to stare. Just as quickly as he stopped, the man continues walking, now making a left turn to begin circling back home. It is easy to guess that something is troubling the young man; he is almost wearing his feelings on his face. Nevertheless, the smile he gives to the little kid who bumps into him is wide and full of feeling. The kid responds with a happy yell in a language he does not understand. He continues walking with fewer contortions on his face.

Once again, he stops as if suddenly impeded. Pulling his phone up from his pockets, he looks at his steps count. A little shake of the head suggests he is unhappy with the number. He is too close to home for it to go up enough today; turning around right now would feel like a loss. He exhales heavily, imagining himself shaking his fist at the sky, resumes walking at his comic pace. It is apparent to any onlooker as he unlocks the front door – this man is now more at ill-ease than before his walk. He has gotten used to it too quickly – the privilege of a leisurely walk. The leisure, perhaps, is supplied in retrospect.  

/srs

 

I like deliberate obfuscation. It is rare that you mean everything you say – rarer still that you say everything you mean. Conversation (and maybe all forms of correspondence) seems to be as much about what is unsaid or incapable of being articulated. It is why we depend outside the text for meaning. If talking was sufficient, facial cues would not matter, the tone of voice would convey little. The glint in someone’s eyes as they report mischief would be inconsequential. I like to play around with these things. Deadpan delivery, for instance, makes it very difficult to gauge the exact amount of truth or sincerity in a statement. A sort of post-ironic no-man’s land where anything can be said because the recipient’s immediate concern is the veracity of your narration rather than its consequence. A mutilation of form to engineer more uncritical acceptance of content.  

A similar thing I can think of is listening to babies tell you stories. They sometimes make things up to narrate with complete sincerity. They are not lying in any appreciable way. The disconnect between hearing something fantastic from a narrator that is not doing it deliberately is not something you get to experience often as an adult.

Even when you are talking to just one other person, the search for meaning extends beyond their words. You want to be aware of the context, you will use all the characteristic information you know to be integral to the narrator, and without a doubt, your response will be a function of your extant relationship with them.

These things also manifest in text; the use of emojis as tone indicators is a truly fascinating phenomenon to me. A speaker who is worried about sounding harsh uses them to reassure. Someone who cannot bring themselves to type something vulnerable uses emojis to convey affection. Everyone is familiar with the use of ‘lol’ to soften the landing of something otherwise incredibly mean. Obfuscation is a lot easier on text. To type without emojis already presents a dilemma to the recipient: “how do I read this? are they mad at me?”

For me, this post-ironic tendency of being almost dishonest about the level of sincerity in narration is perfected in texting. There is significantly more room to play around; there is always more than one way to read a sentence. Without facial cues, tones, or even emojis, every message presents homework. A task in textual interpretation that also allows the narrator to say more than they would with the cost of being taken at face value. When I am texting, it might even be fair to say what is meant is much less than what is said. The excess is a buffer; a bubble wrap of sorts that enables me to overcome the hesitation of saying what I want to say, and risk being perceived as me myself.

Masculin Feminin

 

I watched Godard’s Masculin Feminin today. Paul is not good at anything he tries to do. He is not a good militant, he hates his job, he is not a good boyfriend, not a good a philosopher, is disillusioned with everything, and does not seem to have good relationships with anyone. His predicament does not appear radically different from anyone else’s in the movie. Even the movies he goes to watch with Madeleine seem to be sorry iterations of what he had built up in his head. There is nothing to look forward to and no love to receive.

And yet there is something to envy. His comrade envies the infatuation Catherine has for him. Catherine envies Madeline for the love – inadequate and insincere as it is – she receives from Paul. There is something to Paul in his immediate surrounding that the audience knows better than to love or respect. The purposelessness of his life is accentuated in some part by the absurdity of his death. Narrated with little emotion by Catherine, Paul seems to have fallen to his death in the silliest of accidents.

Going around interviewing people to try and understand life, we get the impression that he is no better off at the end of the movie than in the beginning. It is difficult to tell if his own insincerity and pretentious nature is any clearer to him despite the acknowledgment that his lack of objectivity taints his pursuit. Paul’s inability to articulate anything meaningful appears painfully manifest when he tries to record a message to his girlfriend.

The film was difficult to follow at times, and does treat itself as quite important (not that these are things I find off-putting). The deep-seated discomfort I felt while watching the movie stemmed (I think) from the fact that I could also see myself in the intellectual haughtiness Paul and his comrade display. This is not to comment on the validity of their opinions – they seem to have a sense of their place in the world. It is the fact that their political awareness (and activity) imbues them with a sense of self-importance which is its own reward.

Their politics also seems to have no positive influence in the way they carry their relationships (especially with women). Even the way the comrades talk about women seems not to be informed at all by the radicalism of their professed politics. Men who vandalize a US Army vehicle shouting “peace in Vietnam” have no qualms about repeatedly going up to a woman in a café so they might brush up against her breasts. Paul pushes a line of questioning to a woman who clearly has no idea what she is being asked so that she looks like fool when she says reactionaries are good people. There is nothing he can get right. Not even the reasons why he is not getting it right. The general disillusionment every character seems to have with the way of things resonates just as much today, if not even more.

 

Journey to the Journey to the End of Islam

 

I just finished reading Michael Muhammad Knight’s Journey to the Centre of Islam. It is not often that a book brings me to tears, especially one without a fictional narrative. Knight’s memoir is a journey seeking the end of Islam through several ‘Muslim’ countries. Beginning in South Asia, home to the largest Muslim population in the world, Knight experiences a religion practiced with all the indigenous eccentricities one might expect, with many practices predating the arrival of Islam to the subcontinent. His journey goes through Syria and Ethiopia before culminating in Hajj. There are several Islams and Muslims on display in the book. Their beliefs and practices are at times mutually unrecognisable as stemming from the same theology. Knight himself seems to believe (and decry) several Islams and be several Muslims.

I have often wondered what it is like for a person whose entry to Islam was not through institutionalized instructions that begins before you acquire sentience. The gentle, personal nature of introduction and conversion borne of conviction are concepts somewhat difficult to comprehend. Like most babies born Muslim, the Adhan was recited in my ears soon after my birth. I did not acquire my religion by choice. Being born into it has had (and continues to have) social and political consequences I have often wished I did not have to contend with. Religiously, though, things are even less straightforward. I saw a Zakir Naik clip several years ago where he said until the age of 19 he was only Muslim because he was born one, and it was after that he chose, of his own free will, to dedicate himself to the religion. The first part of it is no less true for me. Knight – in only 15 years of being Muslim – asks a question I too have found myself asking over and over. Am I still Muslim? My name is Mohammad; I will never not be treated as one. However, not unlike Knight, I find myself confronting a fundamental contradiction about the way in which Islam asks us to organize society and what I find to be conscionable. For all the revolutionary potential (and historical praxis) that this call to action has given to people in the last 1500 years, questions about the treatment of women, non-believers, apostates, slaves and the like are things you have to find irreconcilable with a world where we ask not to be defined by our bodies or ascribed identities.

Even as Knight takes in the incredible human spectacle that is Hajj, he experiences a hostility from his fellow Hajjis that seems out of place with the occasion. The custodians of the two Holy Mosques – whose legitimacy to custody is justified by Knight’s roommate by reference to the fact of custody ( a statement that deserves its own book)  – have decided on an interpretation of Islam that leaves no room for pilgrims to bring so much of their dear faith with them to its holiest locations. He interacts with people that anyone who grew up Muslim has seen plenty of archetypes of around them. The young zealot who is quick to takfiri (branding someone a non-believer), the uncles who believe Muslims of other ethnicities have Islam all wrong, non-Arabs who sincerely believes themselves lesser than Arabs because Allah revealed the Quran in Arabic, and the many many men who see it fit to ‘correct’ you when they think you are being Muslim wrong. Even as Knight somewhat denounces the Islam of his peers, he looks inward, casting serious doubt about the validity of his own criticisms. The doubt is not objective – he questions his intentions in concluding that all brothers but him subscribe to a religion that tolerates bigotry as the cost of community. I found myself looking at a mirror here too. The Islam of resistance and the Islam of authority also plays its role in the Knight’s journey. As a call to action, the religion has served a purpose throughout history. Even from a secular and progressive point of view, it is undeniable that some of the bravest and most morally defensible wars of our time are being fought by people out of sincere Islamic convictions.

Meaningful as the journey seems to have been, I wonder if the author really did reach the end of Islam. As he prepares to conclude a Sunni marriage with his girlfriend (having just taken the Shahada as a Shia during his Hajj), I was left with the impression of a man crafting his own Islam from the pieces of his journey – one that he is not obliged to justify to his brothers and sisters. In a stray line somewhere in the middle of the book Knight declares it much easier to be Muslim in America than in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. That requires little explanation. When a fellow hajji castigates him for kissing his fingers during Hajj, he quotes the Quran back at him: “To you your religion, and to me mine.”  

Last Slice

 

What does it mean to say self-consciousness is an expression of desire? Does that mean to be acutely self-aware is incredibly narcissist? When there is one piece of cake left on the table, looking at it constitutes for me an expression of desire. I look around the room to see if such desire manifests amongst the rest. There is a point beyond which everyone’s collective reluctance to be the person who acts on that desire reaches critical mass and you just know it is going to sit there for the rest of the night. I do not know how everyone perceives this. I know I am weighing my desire to eat that cake against my desire to maintain an image of mine in the minds of those around me. I do not know the details of this image; I do not even think they would register me going for that slice, let alone draw conclusions from it. I would not. The only thing I know for sure is that a not dissimilar thought process goes through the minds of the rest of them. Of course, I am also weighing other more specific factors: is that someone’s favourite dessert, is there a child on the table, are we celebrating someone, and so on. But on a more abstract level, going for the last piece is a lot about your perception of desire and your desire to be seen a certain way. It is difficult to argue for living life unexamined, but there are only so many things that can go under a microscope. And it does appear incredibly narcissist if every slide comes from the same source.