Thursday

"Are you the new recruit?" asked a heavy voice.

And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.

"Are you the new recruit?" said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. "All right. You are engaged."

Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.

"I really have no experience," he began.

"No one has any experience," said the other, "of the Battle of
Armageddon."

"But I am really unfit--"

"You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown.

"Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test."

"I do," said the other -"martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day."

Recently, I read a book called The Man Who Was Thursday (A Nightmare). Written a hundred years ago by G.K. Chesterton, one of the best books I have ever had the fortune to read. In the book, Gabriel Syme, a poet turned detective works his way using an ingenious method, involving a gathering of poets and a matter of honour; into the central anarchist council; consisting of people known only by their names, and headed by a funny, yet terrible mastermind known as (what else?) Sunday.

What follows is a heady mixture of surrealism, philosophy and dark humour as the members of the anarchist council discover each other's true nature. The underlying theme of the whole novel, and indeed, Chesterton's purpose in writing it (according to a couple of reviews) is that righteousness is at the heart of a lot of evil in the world, and was intended to reaffirm the author's faith in the world, when he had suffered from depression for most of his life.

These sort of books generally lead me to introspection, and often self-doubt, but this was on a different scale altogether. What if the things we love and the dreams we chase in life are just dark shadows, and what if the world is not black and white but just a miasma of shifting, gray shapes? Already, as an astronomer of sorts, I sometimes feel painfully aware that our lives on this speck of a dust in the universe are entirely insignificant and unimportant, and the span of our lives does not even merit the blink of an eye in the cosmos, if such be there.

But if the reality we perceive may also be distorted, then it is a strange one indeed. Of course, the concrete must thrive, I suppose, but the riot of colours that we often surround ourselves with, on reflection, appears to be a subconscious effort to escape the gray.

(Well, I suppose I have rambled on long enough.)

Morning Glory

From the sleeve notes of an old Oasis album, one of the best pieces of writing I've ever seen. End.

"Coming down off the nova somewhere near the boiled egg that is the Royal Albert Hall, we watch Paul's sun crossed with John's star and hold ice cream hands. Someone slipped on a cassette as the one you wanted left with someone else but somehow it was cool because as the music filled the shadows, you heard a sound that was a million miles away from fakery and a step away from your heart.

Just like it always did, this sound puts the swagger back into your step, the rush into your blood but somehow, and I don't know how, they had become deeper, wider, soulful, better at their craft, inspired by so many things like a world that is tilting who knows where and the applause they always knew was theirs but waited so impatiently to receive. Words cut you from all angles, back up by a monumental sound that rises high, high and high to crash against your rocks and then changes, majestically and magically to soothe the wounds inside. As you are dragged inside on this trip abandon, you hear a council estate singing its heart out, you hear the clink of loose change that is never enough to buy what you need, boredom and poverty, hours spent with a burnt out guitar, dirty pubs and cracked up pavements, violence and love, all rolled into one, and now all this.

At the end you flip over and start again because now you are not isolated. They have gone to work so that you can go home. High above the day turns pink and you feel your feet lift above the ground as new roads open up in front of you. In this town the jury is always rigged but the people know. They always know the truth. Believe. Belief. Beyond. Their morning glory."

Flicker Illness

A couple of days ago, I read about this weird thing in New Scientist : flicker illness. Apparently, if you flash a bright light at a person with a frequency between [sic] 2 and 60 Hz, said person may suffer from anything ranging from headaches and muscle spasms to violent epileptic seizures. Apparently, this was also the cause for people in Japan getting violent seizures from watching a Pokemon cartoon (not because the damn' thing was so awful, as was initially thought.)

Far-fetched as it might seem, I can't wait to head back to the elec lab, rig up an astable at around 30 Hz to a few ultra-white LEDs, and start flashing the damn' thing at anyone who stands in my way.

The Road

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

- Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings


Some paths are weary indeed.

And though they're pretty bad, a couple of photographs from last year.

Sendoff. Fifty years hence?

Library in the setting sun after the rains

Wishmaster

Working as a PA, I have officially run through so many semicolon errors in third year Verilog code that I shall go mad if there are any more.

On another note, a friend told me about something he had heard regarding outcome bias - which basically means that if something goes wrong after taking a certain decision, one would tend to pause and ponder before taking that same decision in a similar situation, regardless of statistically the outcomes work out. Or, exaggerated (as is my wont), someone who has lost by calling heads nine times will tend to call a tail on the tenth flip of a completely unbiased coin.

All this sounds like a lot of nonsense (which it probably is), but it also tends to get me thinking about whether I am too quick in thinking that a whole lot of my decisions in life have been wrong. And still, I am not entirely convinced to the contrary. Decision biases et cetera notwithstanding, I still think that, contrary to the cliched 'I'd do the same all over again', I probably would act differently at the crossroads that I stumbled at, and choose the exact opposite path. Stands to reason, I guess. (or maybe not)

Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid

Some people feel that abstraction is undesirable. The world requires hard, proper, concrete stuff, and has little time for the person who thrives on the unknown and the unsaid. In this world of 'rapine, avarice and expense', as Wordsworth put it (and he lived more than a hundred years before us), the tenuous, inchoate clouds of thought and feeling are rarely welcome. Often in a half-formed state, they are rent, ripped or brought to earth by rampaging hordes of base materialists, hell-bent on pursuing arbitrary motives, which are ironically often not very clear to themselves. The thousand deafening echoes of a single cry of supposed certainty, more often than not drown out the inaudible sighs and whispers of more ephemeral feelings.

Dreamers, I sometimes feel, more often now than at any time in the past, are scarce, and will continue to be so.

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.