Death hovers, constantly. To someone who’s been living with the darkness for a decade, I say: death hovers, constantly. Yet it does not incite fear nor warrant fetishes of dying. It simply hovers, constantly at the edge of your thoughts, at the edge of your feelings, at edge of the day, at the edge of the night. Like the ignored borders of paintings and frames of canvasses, it becomes visible: present, as it were, by its absence.
I feel (or maybe I imagine feeling) every skin, bone and muscle decaying; I feel every coursing drop of blood wring itself of life and drain away. I feel every parting breath as preparing to depart life’s decadent coils. Yet I do not say this for the romanticism of dying. I say this, perhaps, because I feel every inch of life colored invisibly in the brushstrokes of life. Perhaps it is the oil that holds life’s colors together. Death’s sanguine advent orients a conscious living. I do not rush away from death, nor do I spring towards it. It comes each day, closer. To Death, I say: come, freely, stripped of aversion or attraction.
Life’s mechanicality overcomes. Each day is an episode in the great TV season. But it moves without a plot; maybe it does not even ‘move’ at all. Perhaps that it why we crave adventures; we love a good story. All great biographies are fictions with great plots. Destiny becomes that great literary device; and history, that great canvass.
Death becomes, then, that covers of that blank diary, that absurd edge of the canvas. Make your story count, the muses scream; for the clock ticks, the paint dries, the ink fades and your canvas runs out. Make sure you write a good story; make sure your scribbles and brushstrokes make some meaning out of all the junk.
But what if you say: I won’t paint, nor will I write? My scribbles will remain incomprehensible to all who read it; my brushstrokes will be alien and unsettling to all those who set their sights upon it. What then? What if I write an incomplete story, or paint an absurd scene? Or what if I hand in a blank answersheet at the examiner’s bell?
Would the world say he would be truly mad? Would the world say he was a failure? Or perhaps he’d tell the world that it was truly mad. Perhaps the world would be a failure to him. Perhaps he would threaten the world’s sanity, by exposing its insanity.
Bardhaman, Āṣāḍha Kṛṣṇā Ṣaṣṭhī,
The 11th of June in 2020.