all one.

 I set aside my phone and close all the tabs that dig the fingers of distraction into my skull. I have a rough idea of what I want to write about, a stew of thoughts that has been churning in my head for the past couple of days. I do not quite know what the end result will look like, of what styles may be played with. Right now it is a stream of consciousness bursting at the seams. The rhythm of my writing unloads its anxiety  onto this page, and as I see flashes of the old me in this writing style I want to move slowly from it. 

To more spacing. More breath. More cadence. 

From veins that bulge as one tries to hit a high note in a song, to a gentle mellow baritone rising from the depth of my diaphragm. 

Discipline and Freedom is one of my favourite duality to confront. All the metaphors - of the masculine, order, logos seem stale. For in the recent past I have given in to the feminine. Given in to love. There is a discipline borne out of anxiety - one that sees another and tries to imbibe it in himself. I see it in its most disgusting form in the people around me.

Those who have built nothing in the own creative recesses of their mind and insecurely seek to eat into the others around them. Or rather they do not trust the beauty of that which blossoms inside them. A relationship with someone like this can only be based in a disgusting and competitive race to the bottom. Love and sex are tragically beautiful in that they would reveal even this about someone to themself. 

What is touch and what is violation? This seems like the question that should start this line of inquiry. 

As a society we are numb to our bodies. The images and advertisments around us are imbued with libidinal energy. And as we look inside a gym - people with their compression tees, tank tops, yoga pants and stanley cups - each of these products has been commodified. Our beauty standards are in large part influenced by the big corporations who get to define what glamour is through their advertisments and ad campaigns, often holding on the power structure. 

I do not even necessarily blame the people in those fashion houses - in some sense they are simply victims of network effects of capital. To get to the top you would have had a path. And if not for the one who has truly excercised their agency and spoken their own story at every step, you would have been influenced and inducted into the "culture" of whatever your craft is. 

This line of thought does not seem as ripe as what I want to talk about. 

There is a comfort and silence at the base of our cognition. It's the substance of myth and storytelling. It is in the childlike abandon one feels in running behind a football, or when its irregular flight through the air reminds you of your parent picking you up and swinging you. It is in our projection of personality onto animals, to see emotions in each touch you make at the ball. 

It's not that hard to be satisfied with the world really, there is unbounding beauty at the depth of every craft we look in to. 

So then what is taste?

I have recently been reading some hindi literature as a part of my course. Ismat Chughtai's Lihaaf was a piece of fiction that I read recently and felt deeply influenced by. The account of loneliness it gives is eerie. It is not romantic, or over the top - a loneliness that would plunge you into the depths of an isolation chamber. No, it was something that works in the background and slowly empties your evaluation of life itself. 

Reading through it, I had no choice but to stop and reflect - how many stories from 20th century India were never told? What huge depth of human emotions - lives lived and died in single village mud houses, with lanterns, diwali feasts, panchayat meetings - or whatever objectified and orientalized conception I have had of village life - has just never seen the light of day. My heart slowly sank as I thought of how many of these villages must have had people suffer with diseases that modern medicine has only now identified e.g. and have had people live through them - with their own thoughts or people around them - their stories lost to the void with nothing to remember them by. Their relatives, and the villagers around them - their judgements, arguments - everything reduced to a chapter in our history book that still wasn't even covered that well. 

In some sense, AGI is a project to recount that perhaps. Create an experience machine where we can upload whole lives. I am left wondering how much information would a lossless compression of a life have? Can all our data be encoded? And is an artist then someone who seeks axes and modes of recording sensations that we would not have thought of?

A few days back, I was conflicted between those who spend their life telling stories - theirs and ones from their community which have been lost - with those who are at the fore front of development. 

I have demonized finance - in particular investment bankers and private equity (because I thought of them as people who like money but are not smart enough to be quants or ballsy enough to be startup founders) in the past as a discipline that squeezes the juice out of the experience of life. But in light of the duality I highlighted above (to resolve it rather) I have to resort to a different perspective that has also been developing. 

Money is freedom. And it is life force. To look at it with need and disgusting eyes is often where most of us remain stuck. It is also how most of us remain stuck in competition and therefore mediocrity, because in competition our only model for success becomes to be slightly better than other. There is something beyond it required. A certainty, and an uncaringness for your ego. 

I have a friend who quite annoys me. It led me to articulate what I hate about her behaviour and therefore improved my communication a lot. But the constant challenging is tiring. It comes from a need. My need to be understood. Why a lack of sincerity, giving in to superficiality or whatever specific instance it is is triggering to me. 

She thinks that she is better than me, and is constantly challenging my understanding about anything and everything. And it led to great communication because I had to adequately articulate what exactly felt off without breaking the other person. But recently I got into a relationship and this sort of challenging no longer seemed possible to her. Without a space to deeply care or to be able to show it with bodily intimacy all these challenges became simply nitpicking. 

This previous paragraph should be inside a journal but it flowed out in a moment and therefore I shall post it anyways. 

I have a deep need to be understood. It betrays my writing and life. It is what has traumatized my writing into truthfulness and minimalism. I do not flourish my writing for fear of losing you, the reader. 

Yet I already have, because nobody will be reading this long of a passage. To let go of the need to be understood is a sort of loneliness that not many have seen. It is a turn so divine that religious books cannot write about it. When one reads the mandukya upanishad, it puts you in a different sort of trance if you really understand it. That croaking of a frog on the first monsoon - bitter from the pain of not having understood for eons before. It is a brave step into the heart of existence. 

To be able to stand completely alone, which of course you will be at the end of the day. That is where I had seen myself standing. A cage at the top of the mountain looking down at people dancing in a campfire. Being competed with can help us feel that we are together and understood - imagine snowflake and databricks and every employ therein telling themselves the story everyday that "the cloud really is the next most important piece of technology" and fighting for market share and business adoptions. But it is untruth. 

I do not know if relationships are the same.

I love sonny hayes character from F1 for its portrayal of self destruction. Not self destruction in the sense of romanticizing fucking oneself up, which is perhaps real and extremely commodified by capitalism - be it through a culture of drinking/doing substances or through sex and kink, but rather through actually destroying one's self - something that is what religions would like to do if they were not capitalism and glorified mediocrity in the guise of spirituality. 

When he tells kate that "It would be nice to have someone at your back when you're going at 200mph" my brain would like to say that he betrays his truth slightly. Before that moment, he seemed like a person in touch with the real - raw dogging life as it came. An obsessive dive into life itself. Yet in asking for someone to stand behind it feels like he finds a crutch. As Krishnamurti says, in that moment he shies away from standing completely alone. 

That isn't bad or good. Can relationships provide a space for one to develop? A checkpoint to come back to when your climb to the top becomes scary? Or is it necessarily a limitation. Because when one's mind seeks to be understood one becomes necessarily attached. 

There is a pressing need to stand entirely alone. To think entirely for yourself. Frankly it is rather insulting to be understood by whoever is reading this; Because it is far more likely that my writing is mediocre trash than it is that you are one of the few people in the world this is meant to make sense to. 

What happens when one stands completely alone?