06 Sep 2024 / Viewpoint

Looking Vs Seeing

The Blind (Les aveugles) is an intense, one act play of de-personalized characters. Written in 1890 by the Belgian, Maurice Maeterlinck, it presents a world of hope and wait. Within that, resonates varied calls for each viewer/reader. And leaves it at that. With The Blind as paradigm, can be invented an antidote to people poisoning. That unenviable condition of being forced to step outside the arc of transaction and interact with people for large or small wants of self-preservation. To bear the toxicity of human interface, to suffer it to interaction, even intercourse. To pretend, to feign. To be seduced by form and fealty knowing both to be chimeras. Sufferance of the social contract to be couched in niceties and cultivated as precondition of interest. Behind the affect and stance, away from what appears and behind what passes, lies our real visage. And there is nothing nice about it. Not by any stretch of imagination. The realm of the mind it is said, defines and decides what we make of anything and everything. The Sanskrit word for terrible is Aghora. One who seeks reality by this route, Aghori. The nature of Reality is what the Aghori seeks. As a necessary practice the Aghori holds nothing to be true and destroys, by rejection, every philosophy, belief, teaching at the outset. Rejects everything. To most it is a dark, dank, lost plane. Too terrible to bear let alone inhabit. To the Aghori, it is the kindred path to realization and reality. The rise from Savak (human nature) to Shiva (the absolute). The path he adopts is repugnant to most; but they don’t matter. The gift of sight matters. On a particular dimension one sees corporeal bodies as little else except an indifferent, undignified rather repulsive miasma of bones, gristle, tissue and blood with a lot of muck in- between. Not remotely alluring. Even the food we consume, dressed in aesthetic presentations and draped in tempting flavours, is reduced to smelly saliva-coated sludge in mastication and oesophageal exertions, to land in a hash of offending composites. And then expelled as stinking shit. The point is, everything is the polar opposite of what it appears to be. There can be no disputing this unsavoury fact. Realization causes disenchantment. Tears at illusion. It is a different matter altogether that reality and truth are extremely unbearably ugly. So ugly that they cannot be endured. Yet, of all the abilities granted to man, the ability to see is supreme. Seeing should not be confused with looking. The gift of sight, alone, lends vision. Near or far, vision is most, if not all and everything. Gaining vision is the most onerous task of all. Realized across lifetimes or not at all.

M.C. Escher and one of his masterworks (Three Worlds, 1955) depicted above. What do you see? And how do you see it? Known for his impossible constructions, Escher revelled in contradictions and the unison which he could interpret and reflect in drawings. “I play a tiresome game” he sighed. Indeed.

All of what passes as justified belief lies in opinion or partial reality or worse; convoluted belief. Consider, among many, the example of epilepsy. In the 1600s if you had epilepsy, it was ‘proof’ that you had been dancing with the Devil. The only prescribed correction to the deed and its manifestation was to burn at the stake. Only now we know that the alleged dalliance is nothing more than messed up potassium channels in the neurons. It took five centuries to course correct and understand this. Another stray example of mass madness which has only exacerbated manifold in our own time is of Mary. She was born in 1894; and publically executed on September 13 th 1916. Hanged twice when the law stipulates otherwise. She slaved at the Sparks World Famous Show Circus. Work without pay, against her will, in adverse conditions. She had been nursing an untreated toothache and along the way, wanted to eat a piece of watermelon. As she went towards it, an idiot called Red Eldridge, who was her trainer, kept hitting her with a hook. Incensed and enraged, Mary swatted him and the fool died. Charlie Sparks, her original kidnapper and tormentor, decided to kill her and make a paid spectacle of it. A public execution would serve his purpose best. Mary was to be hung till death from a crane, decreed Sparks. In the first attempt, the chain snapped, hurtling her to the ground. She broke a hip. In the second attempt Mary died painfully. In 1916 no one claimed to know that elephants were sensitive and intelligent; should not be kept in captivity. In 2019 everyone does and still holds them captive. In the world’s largest functioning anarchy, India, elephants are killed by trains, by electric shock, by fire, by beatings, by mutilation, by starvation, by disease, by stress and overwork, by state sponsored hunting, by confinement and many more ways than I can imagine. A macabre country which does all of this and worse to elephants while worshipping an elephant headed deity. It fetes him, and profiteers from him.

Worse, they kill each other for this mythical deity. In another twist, the goddess of prosperity is flanked in her representations by twin elephants. The greatest Indian, The Buddha’s lore has it that a white elephant pierced his mother’s womb to herald his birth. In its national emblem, in temples, across handloom bedcovers as surely as in every other bric a brac including good-luck charms elephant motifs abound. The fate of every other non-human is similar. Consider another folk darling: Hanuman. Temples to him at every other street corner, he rides atop vehicle dashboards like his elephant headed brother. A causal appeal to professor Google will tell you with fair amount of detail, the terrible condition of these two denizens of the animal kingdom. They are subjected to the most pathetic cruelty just as their idols are feted and leveraged to run entire enterprises of commerce. Sadistic irony of a depraved people. Fact is, idiots comprise the overwhelming majority of people. And this miasma with its absolute inky blackness has permeated all and everything. It drips onto everyday life, on our heads, into our eyes in lazy, heavy drops. Obliterating all light slowly.

The Murder of Mary

What is human knowledge? What is its worth? What does it achieve except in full measure except the by-products of more indigenous methods of exacerbated misery and ever greater layers of disguised blight? Essential collateral cost you may argue. Perhaps. But then true, pure, high knowledge with an end purpose. A founding father of the European Enlightenment, Rene Descartes, is an example: in 1647, Rene Descartes exploded biology wide open by theorizing that the body was merely a mechanical instrument. The soul was what gave consciousness, and it resided somewhere in the pineal gland. He held that animals cannot suffer because they have no souls. Unfortunately for the neighbourhood dogs, Descartes also theorized that only humans had souls. If animals were soulless, they were just machines. Therefore they didn’t feel pain—they only acted as if they did. So therefore, it was okay to cut them open and experiment on them. And Descartes sure loved a good experiment. By his own account, Descartes happily sliced open dogs and stuck his finger into their still-beating hearts, marvelling at how the valves opened and closed around his knuckle. But the madness doesn’t stop there. According to some biographers, his first vivisection was an attempt to discover once and for all if animals had souls. And the animal he chose to practice on was his wife’s dog. Taking a hammer, Descartes nailed the creature’s paws spread-eagled to a board and proceeded to chop it to pieces, utterly unfazed by the “appearance” of pain. Whether he really was looking for the soul or not, is a fact that’s been lost to history. All we know is that the dog died shortly afterward in unimaginable agony. How Descartes’ wife reacted to finding out her husband mutilated and murdered her pet to prove an obscure point, has not been recorded either. All vivisection experiments are fiendish. Descartes was just another experimenter. Human knowledge, its pursuit at least.

We are blighted in our sight and therefore in our understanding. Chimeras created by deep seated and intrinsic failings, drive and run us. Amid the discontents of civilization, strewn asunder in dense frequency is example and illustration in ample measure. By extension, human knowledge and its terrible, horrible mechanics of administration, egregious in the extreme, ought to make any thinking man shiver and quiver. It sways and swings between ill-digested fact, confused interpretation and putrefied application. Fact/truth/reality is a pathless land. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle asserts the fundamental limit to the precision with which physical properties if even a particle may be known. The more precisely the position of any particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known and vice versa. The point is, knowledge at best, even in its purist form is quicksilver like. Slips through. Deviations of position and deviations of momentum are intrinsic to that most basic of building blocks: particulate matter. Where does human knowledge stand? What is it? And what is its integrity? I don’t know. It is too ponderous to think it. In the vortex of human knowledge which roars around us from childhood until death, the antidote is to be astonished by everything. It grants a perpetual state of thrall to childlike curiosity and awe. And a very welcome addiction to the joy of understanding. This, is prescription to help bide one’s time in life while flying under the radar. One must never be an ally to human knowledge. And one must scurry away from human belief. Belief in enshrined and fed in every human institution. Therefore, it is the most dangerous. Human knowledge resonates in Descartes and human belief is demonstrated in the murder of Mary. Two examples from a never-ending list of sins. That said, everyone sets their own orbit. Mine is a practice I call corrosion of conformity. A lonely furrow, but decidedly better.