This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper, poet T.S. Eliot wrote a century ago. Two centuries before him, Alexander Pope spoke of the world ending with a 바카라yawn바카라바카라 after a long pandemic of dullness. If those are symptoms of doomsday, we can safely conclude we바카라re far from it. The phantasmagoria we바카라re seeing today was surely dreamt up by a more reptilian brain. What else could have conjured up such a cocktail of doom, with every ingredient associated with celestial wrath and retribution바카라pestilence, death, floods, cyclones, earthquakes, locusts alongside burning forests, clinical depressions, scorched relationships and combusted jobs? One thing is clear: for the breath-rationed and the bereaved, this isn바카라t the time of the whimper. Or the yawn. The Covid era is one of the gasp.
And so, 2021 draws to its close바카라at the end of which we probably know more about the Greek alphabet than the virus. I have lost several dear to me. Some haven바카라t. But we바카라ve all had our share of thoughts about endings. I read the Sartre play decades ago. But when the doors slammed shut, and we were left with the mind-numbing chatter of our minds, the phrase that rang catatonically through my days was 바카라No Exit바카라. Energetically, this was stasis. Scripturally, this was pralaya. Experientially, this was the dead-end. Witnesses no longer, we were participants바카라perpetrators, victims, agents, colluders, confronted by the finite rhythms of our breath, and the grim consequences of collective irresponsibility. No hands were unsoiled. No gaze was innocent.
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Blame games and conspiracy theories have abounded. But shifts have happened too. Almost everyone, irrespective of age or cultural background, seems to have attempted some brand of life audit. 바카라I am dying,바카라 a terminally-ill woman once told a Tibetan monk. 바카라So are we all,바카라 he replied, and because he spoke from daily experience, not fridge-magnet wisdom, she instantly trusted him to guide her through her death process. Mortality has always looked us in the face. But it바카라s not just the Tibetan monk of the anecdote who knows it today; we are all far more sharply aware that the cadaver바카라s face could be our own. And Shiva바카라s tandava is the dance of freedom we might be capable of if we knew how to be present at our own cremations. In short, if we knew how to be responsible for our own lives바카라and deaths.
This is not to underestimate the horror, or to trivialise the consequences for the poor and disenfranchised. But with the imminence of death, the experience of life does somehow grow sharper. I know an octogenarian who has suddenly found herself writing poetry. Friends seem to be picking up long-forgotten musical instruments and reading lists, trying to heal festering relationships, changing the ground rules of their work lives, rekindling forgotten friendships, gardening, making time for meditation, moving out of big cities, walking the beach.
And what has become of viraha바카라that experience of separation, immortalised by so much secular and sacred literature? Think of all the songs and poems we know about separation바카라of being parted from lovers, spouses, parents, natal homes, motherlands, heaven or the divine. I have found myself thinking recurrently about Meghaduta, that classic love lyric by Kalidasa, in which a pining lover asks a passing cloud to deliver a love message to his beloved wife. But the Cloud has taken on an entirely new meaning for us today. And with the dailiness of Zoom and WhatsApp, we have all turned, matter-of-factly, into time travellers. No more fluffy cloud couriers for us. Even while our physical doors were shut, our digital windows have been open to friends, colleagues and families바카라invented and inherited바카라around the world. A radical shift has been embraced with staggering ease! As so many ideas about space and time have been tossed neatly out of the window, the human imagination will surely never be the same again. Was it the spiritual teacher, Mooji, who said that learning to live apart in time is learning to live together in eternity? I바카라m beginning to suspect we might have had a foretaste of that eternity.
I am also struck by how many unlikely people seem to be talking of listening to the 바카라heart바카라. What was seen as mere escapism, the resort of dilettantes and New Agers, now gradually appears to be part of an urgent process of self-recovery. What바카라s more, something could well be shifting. With the alchemy of attention, as the Bhakti and Sufi poets tell us, psychological and spiritual wounds turn magical, even sacred. 바카라The wound is the place where the Light enters you,바카라 Rumi said (in what is now a much-recycled WhatsApp message). If a finger on a button can annihilate the world, perhaps one finger can save it? If we retrieved all the life energy that we kept frozen in pockets of pain, hurt and mistrust, perhaps that finger could even be ours? That could well be the power of the sovereign human being, no longer willing to outsource responsibility for her life.
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Yes, the word 바카라apocalypse바카라 hangs heavy in the air. But the thing about being Indian is that we don바카라t really believe in endings, do we? We find it difficult to subscribe to anything so conveniently terminal. The Tibetan idea of the bardo바카라as an interval, an in-betweenness not just between lifetimes, but between breaths바카라has always resonated deeply with me. I have long been fascinated by commas rather than full stops. Surely caterpillar dreams turn apocalyptic when they dissolve into green mush in their cocoons? It must feel terrifying바카라a bit like turning from alchemist to the swirling contents in a conical flask. Or to use a Biblical image, from free agent to Jonah in the whale바카라s belly. A nightmare, yes. But is it the end, or could it be the interregnum바카라the reboot, the bardo?
The Sanskrit dramatists tell us life has its tragic moments, but no tragic endings. We aren바카라t the land of King Lear and Oedipus, because we have always known that fallen heroes get a chance to rewrite their scripts바카라even if it is in another lifetime. Scholar Bihani Sarkar points out that classical Sanskrit playwrights invariably have 바카라tragic middles바카라 in their plays. These are the moments of rupture바카라identities are questioned, ethical systems turn turtle, existential questions raise their heads, every nightmare of abandonment, separation, loss and despair is played out. But it is still the middle. The pause. The other half of the play is yet to unfold. And it does. But even when the trauma of separation is healed by union, it is not a simple 바카라happily ever after바카라 ending. For, it is not merely circumstances that have changed. After the 바카라tragic middle바카라, we are irrevocably changed.
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Perhaps the Covid moment, then, is our bardo. The moment when we see바카라upfront and un-photoshopped바카라the grimy consequences of living with fragmented gazes. We바카라d like to blame our gods, our ancestors, our parents, our politicians, each other. But for how long? Until we 바카라all fall down바카라, as the old nursery rhyme goes? Maybe it is time to abandon the playground politics? Time to embrace a new way of engaging with the world, rooted in the knowledge that the fundamental problem is our own divided, hierarchical minds? Perhaps the apocalyptic future then is for those who live in the past. For those who live in memory. We wake daily to yesterday, I wrote in a recent poem, a fragment of which I reproduce here. It바카라s been a memo to myself when I find myself gnashing my teeth over current affairs:
We wake daily to yesterday바카라.
And the apocalypse is where it always was:
in the tiger-infested, guerrilla-stalked heart
we바카라ve carried around forever
and even the dictator바카라s face
is a cartoon
we drew one night,
drunk
and wildly unoriginal,
and kept meaning to erase,
except that we somehow got busy.
(How did we get so busy?)
Upside-downness, we are told, is a sign of the quickening of the spirit. Mystic poets down the ages have used the language of absurdity and opaque paradox바카라ulatbaasi or sandhyabhasha, twilight language바카라to speak of this. A tree with its branches in the earth,/Its roots in the sky, says Kabir. An ant flew into the sky/ She swallowed the sun, says Muktabai. The deer with the tiger바카라s head,/ the tiger with the deer바카라s head, says Allama Prabhu, in a line reminiscent of the Isaiah image: The wolf shall live with the lamb. Tukaram says: When he comes out of the blue--/ a meteorite/ shattering your home.../ be sure/ god is visiting you.
If 바카라god바카라 is a loaded word, we could try 바카라life바카라 instead. The weather is cyclonic. Imagine the planet lurching and pitching in a galactic tempest. Pots and pans, furniture and microwaves, loved ones and livelihoods are flying around the room. When they settle, the map of our lives will look different. What바카라s more, seasick, storm-tossed, and yet more deeply ourselves, we will be different. But there바카라s some consolation in knowing that for the great goddess, Life, it바카라s just another day in Her crazy laboratory.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Song Sung Blue")
(Views expressed are personal)
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Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and author. Her most recent work is Women who wear only themselves
