Atavisms | Spindrift

"Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn't entirely there.

You haven't heard of the Bay of Mante, have you? he said.

'No, sir,' said Mort.

Famous shipwreck there.

'Was there?'

There will be, said Death, if I can find the damn place."
- Mort, Terry Pratchett


If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.

-A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5. 1



Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown
of life.

-Revelation, 2. 10

It was a bloody hectic time. Feverishly writing out the final few annoying lines of code for my project, about 10 cups of tea a day, writing lab report for the Comm. labs, reading for tests, trying to be steady during lab exams, thinking about a lot of beginnings and endings, trying to be coherent, and not succeeding very well, writing for interns applications, the cut-and-run of the finals, muted goodbyes, hurried journeys and the final despondency when it was all finally, immutably over.

They say that sometimes when the battle is over, the interminable peace during the aftermath is worse than the struggle.

Sitting in the frigid NCRA computer lab hunting quasars, it came to me that I was suffering from an advanced state of shell-shock, that the gloom was there to stay unless I exorcised it, and that listening to Viva la Vida twenty times in a row was not going to ease the pain. I should have started accepting that I was still capable of enjoyment after all the upheaval, as so many people were trying to tell me.

So here's to devastation and to destruction, to Lucifer and Gabriel, to pride and prejudice, and to resurgam and revelations. And not necessarily in that order either. 'Let there be light' is a sweeping and highly general statement, but there is no denying that illumination of the order of a few candela would definitely not be remiss.

A Long Time Ago, in a Dimension Far, Far Away

"If you cut us, do we not bleed? if you
tickle us, do we not laugh?If you poison us, do we not die?..

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."



' That's it'
'Six by nine. Forty-two.'
'That's it. That's all there is.'


In this world, there are too many equations. And too many unknowns. Time was, when I could have twisted and turned them into something clear, something lucid, something tangible. But now all I can see, is mist, swirling.

Smoke and mirrors, as they say. And ne'er was a truer word spoken. When two doors open for every one that closes, you know there is an elaborate mechanism in the labyrinth designed to trap you, squeeze the life and imagination out of you, before you finally get to face the Minotaur.

And the best part is,there is nothing you can really do about it. The easiest way out is the shortest, where you actually enjoy the darkness, the smoke and the mirrors before the part where there is fire and brimstone everywhere.

Black Horse and a Cherry Tree

Phew! Finally managed to upload an image using ScribeFire....

Into each life a little rain must fall.

The sun beats down upon the head, the air is humid and oppressive, and the extreme heat makes it impossible to think, or indeed do anything but curse at the fates that torment you, and not only with the weather. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego entering the furnace come to mind.

And then it comes, a shower of light rain,blowing down with the west wind... sweeping away the heat, the cares...and the thoughts. Most of them.

These Doubts Strike Deep

Uncertainty pervades every moment of our existence. It is everywhere, right down to the subatomic level where even electrons are only ghostly shadows of probability. What do you do; when you come across not two; as in the poem by Frost, but several paths diverging in a wood, and have absolutely no idea of which one to take? What do you do when you feel as if you somehow are failing to communicate with those close to you; when you feel as if you are under an ocean of doubt, and sinking deeper still?

Though one thing is certain, which I have learned in the twenty-odd years I have lived so far...it is generally much simpler to tell the truth, the essential, the basics. As the ending to the science fiction series of books, Rama, by Clarke goes,

..“I understand,” pseudo-Nicole said in the scene.

I understand, the real Nicole said to herself. That is the most important statement anyone can ever make. The whole key to life is understanding. And now I understand that I am a mortal creature whose time of death has come.
Another surge of intense pain was accompanied by a fleeting memory of a Latin line from an old poem: Timor Mortis conturbat me. But I will not be afraid, because I understand...

And that is all.

All too soon, it is time to take off the masks of contorted emotion and go back to the mundane humdrum ritual of normal human existence; which is a relief, in some ways. Recently, I watched a movie called Enchanted, which tries to play on the theme that morals and ideals are not completely dead, even in today's world, that people can be good, and a lot more.

Maybe it is time to behave as if it is an ideal world after all.

Random Poetry

From Reluctance .. by Robert Frost

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Summer Wine

And the balmy air of summer arrives again, bringing with it a feel of nostalgia - an acute yearning for the wonder years when life was much more free and easy, and all one had to do was sit or play under the warm sun.

Now one has worries, cares, not to be lightly brushed aside, but to be looked at rationally, and dealt with, according to one's capacities. I have never been very good at expressing feelings, specially on paper/screen , but I feel this is very definitely a part of growing up to be an adult.

This ain't over yet (or so I hope)

An engineering student, specially one in the third year of his degree, seems to have a tad too many facets of the same basic principles to learn. I mean, come on, we are looking at MOSFETs (Microelectronics), what's inside them (Electronic Devices), and how gates somehow fabricated from them can be used in even more complicated ways to do stuff that we want done (Digital Design). And what with Electric Machines dropping in from time to time as well, it seems as if there's a bit too much of state to handle, and too little IN-Ter-Es-Ting (as Feynman put it) stuff going on.

.......................................................................................

On a completely discordant note :

I always loved the Arthur C. Clarke stories from "Tales of the White Hart". They're about science fiction writers, actual scientists, and a smattering of weird characters sitting in a bar, and discussing wildly improbable and fantastic incidents, but with a grain (or more) of science all the same. Maybe I should start to write something of the sort too. I feel as if all of the good names for engineering-based writing have been gobbled by the popular magazines though. I mean, the lowest I would go would be to named my collection Nuts and Volts, and even that has been taken.



....................................................................................