YOU LIVE ONLY IN TIME

YOU LIVE ONLY IN TIME

by Fazal Rahman on Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 11:25pm ·

           ‘Eternal’ is fake.
            Life sans death is no life;
           ‘In time’ is the thing.

xxxxxxxxxx

Sibyl failed to ask for eternal youth.  Bad? Yes, under the circumstances. But what if she hadn't? Would it have mitigated her suffering? How would one feel being young when he/she sees his/her dear ones going the natural cycle of life from birth through childhood, youth, old age and death, getting what is due to them from time to time? The veneration of old age? The agonies and ecstasies of life? Would he/she be able to think: “oh, the lucky me! To be quiet unaffected by such ups and downs!” Would he/she feel at home with the newer generations replacing the older ones with whom he/she lived thus far? How far will one be able to put up with an on-looker status, no matter he/she looks an Adonis/Venus? In all probability he/she would sooner than later run the risk of acute depression and cry out: “Give me my normal wear tear back, give me my cross.....!Take away this aging youth from me and give me my own old age...! Give me my death...!”

They say childhood is a blissful time. Yes, when it comes when it should come. Else, it is torture. Was Benjamin Button happy, moving reverse from old age to youth to adolescence to childhood....and an innocent infantile death...? No, he suffered, suffered like hell. Those who grope in the dark alleys of memory loss, tenants of long forsaken tenements with no key, are mistakenly thought of as children reborn... But what are they? Relics of a ghost land lost in shadow worlds, fleeting images of memories pinning them down to their parched existence like nails into the wood of the cross: Santiago gasping: “Ay...!”. Caught in the twilight zone of births and rebirths, Appukkili was always restless, in communion with meanings the world of the sane was denied of. That is why he has to vanish for days and re-emerge from his keeping company for the dead, unscathed by the epidemic or the general grief over it.

Was Oskar Matzerath contented, chose as he did of his own accord, to stop growing at the age of three?  No, he fancied of watching the world of the grownups, from the detached point of view of the self-willed child, but ended up just the opposite: a child with the involved conscience of an overgrown intellectual, the ironies and absurdities of what he saw around him gnawing into his psyche, his very existence. His fate is to end up practically a genome, in a mental institution.

Life, with all its imperfections, is one stream. No theatrical standstills and resumptions, no maudlin protract ions or frozen sharp cuts, no flash backs, no fast forward gimmicks. No matter where it springs, and whereby it flows- it has to reach its confluence... in time. It’s pure Aristotle: it should have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s a big joke. It’s very serious.

XXXX

( Sibyl of Cumae of the ancient legends, Oskar Matzerath of 'Tin Drum', Benjamin Button of the Story by Fitzgerald and the Movie, Appukkili of O V Vijayan's masterpiece, Santiago from Hemingway are remembered.)