SUBLIME

 

SUBLIME

 ‘Heat Waves’ - Glass Animals

Cold air strikes as I enter, into absolute stillness, only the distant whirring of a fan. A few pens scratching on a paper, minds busy at work. A couple of people file in soon after, and the bustle begins. The bustle turns into a horrid pandemonium, the likes of which would be prevalent if inmates were juveniles. Perhaps the ailments of a common teenager resemble starkly with those that the honourable law deems unfit for a functional society, or the laws are no longer in touch with the reality of today’s liberty. However, the noise slowly subsides, because no matter how swollen our awareness has become, it hasn’t dented our ability to distinguish appropriation (at least for some).

The sunlight pierces the tinted windows, tinted by the dust that has settled from years it has sustained in service against the winds. Its all about patterns- tessellations. A drop spreads, expanding, yet thinning, it covers a greater swathe of area but loses its shape in the process. The same waveforms repeat time and again, places and places. They say repetition is boring, repetition is tedious, but fail to notice that in repetition, we find comfort. It provides reassurance. We live the same cycle, every second, every day, every year. Every species evolves and then ceases to exist. The pendulum oscillates, mean to extreme, extreme to mean, and we declare it to be physics. The atom repeats itself, sometimes linearly, sometimes haphazardly, and we call it chemistry. The body repeats the same existential functions every living moment and we call it biology. Everything we study is unravelling patterns, and imagining that newer patterns exist. Language, history, geology- all are patterns: we provide a hypothesis and find proof to support it. What are aesthetics, if not randomizing based on a similarity- abstraction in order.

Patterns change over time but even that change is gradual and patterned in itself. Literature is an expression of all that our brain rejects, the patterns that we aren’t sufficiently advanced to appreciate, history is hoping that those patterns repeat themselves. Commerce is a mechanism that holds up this material world, in a way that millions of people with similar knowledge can continue developing and identifying similarities.

The art of abstraction shares a pattern- their disregard for patterns, and the hate they receive from folk that aren’t further along this path of dis-attaching from what we’ve come to associate everything with. As time, which defines all periodicity, moves forward, we wish for its symmetry- a flow against its eternal march, a way to break thorough the barrier of the present.

And yet, every effort to change the order of nature only ends up being another step towards self-destruction (would that be so bad after all?)

I see pigeons in a huge cage on the roof, braving the weather. They have ample space, to fly around their cage, to spend time as they please. But they are denied the inherent freedom of open skies. A rather large chunk of the window I’m looking though has been broke and serves as a peering point to the open and also leaks out the freshly conditioned air, rendering the ACs futile. However, even without them, the room has a certain coolness and tranquility, the reason why we like it when the sun starts to set- the ceasing of hindered motion, giving into inactivity. A slight shuffle in the leaves tells me of the tidings of the outside world, with soaring temperatures, and closely knit houses. The structures are so cooped up that an observer might think they’re the same structure from afar. I feel a slight coarseness on the page and realize the third purpose of the window- an inflow of the dust that settles on all that is at rest.

Children mill around with a certain aberration and the freedom to be happy, a commodity we are perhaps too old to afford.