About Us - Farafield

Far Afield

It is a terribly tall and difficult order to fulfil: “What is Far Afield?” “A blog” is a half-way answer. There are innumerable blogs with all sorts of claim, stance, form, intent and naturally, success. No one wants another blog; there’s enough and more.

Far Afield, then, is more chain than clank. It reflects my credo practiced since I began orbit on the planet. From the prism of worldly wisdom, the credo is insensible, even self-destructive to a degree, and hugely unpopular. It rests on the questions of ‘why ?’ ‘how ?’ and ‘why not ?’ It reports answers on the metric of ‘saying it like it is’. A rolling stone, Far Afield has no predictable roll, no planned landings. Seized of idea and incident, it flits around anecdotal analects, the business of living, contraflows and things in-between. And then, some more. Perhaps.

Tigermoth Mindscapes

Conceived as anchorage of idea and articulation, grounded as much in truth, as possibility, raised at the university of life, fed at streams of endless fractals, employed by curiosity, Tigermoth Mindscapes ponders questions attempted in its vectors : Far Afield {Blog} and Zero {Podcasts}.

This ‘About Us’ peg is christened ‘Who’ | ‘What’. Because that is direct, cuts-to-the-chase. It addresses introductions in plain vanilla. In as bland, obvious and direct a manner as possible. Without expecting any visitor (guided or misguided) to bother with eulogy of ‘about’ grounded in ‘us’ ‘who’ and >‘what’ offer a stark, functional view. It is a different matter that in this case, there’s no ‘us’.

I have a loner type of nature; it borders on misanthropy. I find greater integrity in relationships with non-humans and Nature. For the greater part of my life, I have flown solo and under the radar ---- I prefer it that way. This blog, essentially, is an effort to re-claim a self-fulfilled zone. Make-believe maybe, but my own exoplanet in a virtual universe. Typically, always, and as definition, a blog is architected around people. Around engagement, interaction. It rests on, and exists for intensely social aspects of humanity. It has information, opinion, chatter. It seeks to create material equations of shared self-interest. And generally revels in ‘how much’ and ‘how often’. This is none of that. Tangential to the extent of being marginal, Far Afield is ruminative, reclusive. I should be happy that you are here, and I truly am. As to the ‘who’ ---- beyond customary name and odometers of time spent bumbling along on the planet, in a really meaningful sort of manner, I frankly don’t know who I am. No one really does in the zero-sum game that’s life. Human habit and one’s sense of orientation necessary to transact with the world, necessitate names. Names promise much, deliver little. Away from any ministering intelligence at play, a name is used to get around the world. A label, really. Mine is Amit Chaudhery.

From fan dancers to flea circus operators to languages as different as Chekhov from Gogol. From self-declared founders of anti-profanity leagues to the barroom types. From pretentions to lies to affectations there’s an increasingly hideous state of the world I still try to bend my ears to. Between this and scrapbooks of the mind, I offer this blog. I have run the greater part of my course in life and cannot claim that I look forward to the remainder with anything more than curious amusement. With second lives and first loves, run in-parallel, my cup brims over. As I understand it, all and everything sits between our two ears. The entire interpretation, relevance, engagement, agency, drive, understanding {plus all attendant adjectives} spring from and fall back within our heads. Intensely subjective, personal, unique, this is solitary cartography to navigate the world with.

I am an early convert to the idea and the belief that the task of accepting polarities one confronts in life --- if one has the will to live one’s truth --- without allowing either of its terms to swallow the other, should be a creative one. I believe so. It is the silly and juvenile aim of eventual unification that I consider misplaced. It is misplaced both in our thoughts about how to spend the currencies of life and in our conception of whatever intelligible exists. The co-existence of conflicting points of view, varying in detachment/attachment from the contingent self, is not just a peculiarly necessary illusion, it is also an irreducible fact of life. We decorate our existence with countless fictions, twisting and turning towards silence for relief. There’s no redemption from being human. None is needed perhaps.

Within our heads we are islands. We live in island universes. This portal offers views from my universe. Nothing exceptional, but somethings interesting and relatable (I hope). Take it as it is served. I rest my case. I must thank you for visiting a solitary furrow.

Postscript: the symbol above denotes the existential quantifier. It is used in predicate logic to prove existence. The visual below, a Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.

Enjoy the ride of life ---- even if you don’t like or understand it.