::: Star Weekend Magazine :::

Imagining God and Other Things

Mausumi Mahapatro

The impulse towards sojourn, not merely of the physical kind but that which requires the faculty of imagination, speaks to our infidelity for the present, our deep seated restlessness and yearning for the other, yet to be traversed or imagined, or to be imagined again and again like a human ritual inescapable.

Thus, we fantasise time travel or the rings of Saturn from a foot afar. We travel back to the future or to the days when Jesus lived or kings, queens and warriors imagined their own denouements. We imagine-mechanic societies free from the straitjacket of tiresome emotions: love, identity or the imbecile need to impute meaning in all that appears empty and without purpose.

The free enter the mind of the slave for leisure; the slave fantasises of the first days of freedom.

But our bond to the human experience binds us to fathom only so much. Our robot heroes and machines, we cannot bear to imagine, robbed of the joy in friendship, the sadness of enduring repetition, or the loneliness of the realisation of solitude.

1984, we envisioned through Orwell's imagination. We cringed, some of us, at the thought that thought itself could be shaken and stripped nude; that our bedrooms could reverberate our deepest confessions into the stern yet perverse bureaucrat's year, not absorb them in muted innocence as expected of a wall, a stone or a blackened piece of earth.

What then shall we expect or imagine a hundred years from the time when Big Brother was imagined? Would our world be one part fire, two parts ice or the reverse, dear Frost? Or could it be like Dante's inferno perhaps?

…A place mute of all light, that bellows as the sea does in a tempest, if it be combated by contrary winds. The infernal hurricane with its rapines, whirling and smiting it molests them.

And in this prospect world of wind and wail, would there remain the eternal collective ambivalence that shrouds the existence of God or a resolute certainty of presence or absence?

Suppose God as an anachronism like those who envision still, the earth at the center of the universe a dead poet revered for only His words of prose. Imagine the anarchy, the freedom, of this time and place No Big Brother or God to whom to confess, only the wretched living out of purposeless days and nights, empty with meaning but brimming with choice without promise.

At this endpoint of the world we come face to face with certainty, where all doubts cease and melt into a substance that burns our eyes and tongue, where we see ourselves in their truest form and shriek in disgust. The cause for each of our insecurities surfaces and plays itself out to an audience, loud and rasp, the process endless with humiliation of an equal intensity each time, while our thoughts fester as boils on our heads, or lice, itching and scratching, until we pop them dead from the surface of the flaking skins on our scalps. We lose all sense of image of ourselves; all we are left with is the burning sensation as thoughts are killed, one by one or many at a time.

And yet, we still feel love - in all directions - though we scratch our heads with fierce abandon. We hear stories of a time when love was constrained and tied up in a knot so tight you couldn't breathe - where only two people: man woman, man man - we do not know- made a vow to one another to love, honour and cherish. We stare aghast thinking this could not be. Men who could be our great grandfathers tell us, even papers were signed, contracts were sealed, and grand ceremonies of celebration were made.

They also believed, our elders tell us, that spirits, gods or deities presided over them in another world, dictating between right and wrong and appearing from time to time in momentary visions in dreams, atop mountains or in valleys. We laugh and laugh until our cheeks turn blazing red in tandem with our heads.

When we switch on our vast mental libraries in search for all the history files that could unearth the past, we learn about jungles of tiger and erstwhile palaces lined with marble minarets and algae green moats that stretch out into flowerbeds. These palaces are now colonies for the dead, we discover, where we also will be laid to rest. The files expose more: that our ancestors were settlers choosing to live out their days in the same places with the same persons. They took pride in themselves, the languages they spoke and the boundaries they belonged to. They were not wanderers without ties to land, soil or blood, like ourselves. We imagine such a settled life with a single set of persons to call one's own would it not grow weary and strained? They saw life as meaningful, not futile, and we laugh some more.

We learn new words that befuddle us like religion and superstition and wonder where one ends and the other begins. We play little games where we speak to our ancestors in a make believe séance, asking all the questions that unsettle us. One of us asks, “Why do you choose to return to a single point out of an infinite continuum? “Because infinity is wearisome,” the ancestor amongst us responds, smirking at his witticism.

The game continues and another asks, “Why do you choose to believe in something you cannot see, hear or touch.” “But we cannot see, hear or touch love, only the object of that love. Does love not exist then?” says our friend, the role player.

We laugh at our game playing as we scratch and rub until the coagulated blood on our heads turns loose drop by drop, and as we scratch, we think, “We still feel love.” And in these very moments, the thought emerges from some deep cavernous recess, that first seed of doubt, the characteristic ambivalence that defines our humanity, to shake our certainty undeniably like something that we once believed with either passion or indifference long ago but had since forgotten.

Assist me, Heav'n! But whence arose that pray'r?Sprung it from piety, or from despair?

Melancholy returns but with it a hope, an ancient memory of God, formless but present, despite the agony of thought battling thought and the lesions its manifestation. And so said Eloisa to Abelard,

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns,
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
Yet, yet I love!...