“… Amongst the saints, who are the truly great men ofaction, for they act with all their emotions not just some of them, this senseof the nothingness of life leads to the infinite. They garland themselves innight and stars, anoint themselves with silence and solitude. Amongst the greatmen of inaction, to whose ranks I humbly belong, the same feeling leads to theinfinitesimal; feelings are pulled taut, like elastic bands, the better toobserve the pores of their false, flabby continuity.”
Fernando Pessoa
There are no words that can explain the predicament ofhaving been born with a desperately ambitious heart yet with no courage tostand to its own promises that it invariably makes, promises that it doesn’teven know it has made; only because it belongs to this great man of inaction,who does nothing practically but think, with a minimal or least awareness ofhis physical surroundings. Such a fateful man, with such a vast and complexnetwork of his mind’s tentacles, whose replicating thoughts often get entangledwith his past experiences, whirls and often loses itself in the labyrinthforever. By this, I do not hint at a man’s absurd position with relation to theever pervading war between his personal and absolute reality, I am here to hintat the utter misfortune of such men who think. Before we proceed to understandthe minds of these ‘cursed people’, the word ‘thinking’ must be seen as asymbol of ‘over-thinking’ while the word ‘creation’ understood holistically as’creativity’ or simply ‘any act of doing’.
Two kinds of people and two kinds of results produced
Having just called thinking to be a misfortune of the cursedlot, many of you might counter-argue considering thinking to be an ambitiousfaculty that any man of reason must feel privileged to attain. Yet myobservations suspect that nothing makes a man’s resolve weaker as his facultyof thinking does. Although the opposite of it in terms of probability maypromise authentic results, yet many times we refrain from the exercise ofthinking either because the situation doesn’t really command it or when itdoes, we generally lack the time to be risked away in thinking. Consequently,we either act or runaway.
Excusing the very few balanced minds that the world has; ifa binary is thus to be established between people with respect to the use ofthis faculty called Thinking, one could broadly categorize people into twokinds. People who don’t think and people who relentlessly always do. Althoughthe absence of thinking, in the first category might suggest ignorance or evenarrogance in a man, yet this ignorance but with a man’s awareness of his simpleset of responsibilities makes him deliver better at whatever cellular status heretains in the hierarchy of our civilized societies, a loose example could betaken of say a bus driver whose thinking doesn’t investigate universe but isfocused on avoiding accidents on the road. This thinking which we canconclusively term as ‘caution’ sometimes manifests also as ‘concern’ when thesame person is, say, too responsive to his domestic responsibilities, that makehim a less philosopher but certainly a great husband. On the other hand,arrogance mixed but with a tinge of consciousness of ‘the need and necessity’can surprisingly again yield results that shall forever be only dreamt of by athinker, drugged by his vain addiction of over-thinking. His ideas foreverremain in the zygote stage that never matures into action, while the onlyavailable time, in all its poverty, lapses.
Fernando’s saint in making
Far beyond such minds that exert less in thinking, let’s nowimagine a capable thinker, on the other hand, who is completely divested of hiscapacity to create or do. This fortunate man is neatly condemned to a lockedcloset of failure, far away from the eyes of the demanding world. Generally,the absence of expectations from such a man, however tormenting, grants but apeaceful pleasure of a man’s loneliness or even solitude, to him. He takesrefuge into whatever he deems fit and self-sustains for as long as he can,suffocated, withdrawn and certainly depressed. This feeling of alienation canhowever promise a consequent positive outcome too. The withdrawal and emptinesscan lead such a man to the infinite, and can alchemise him from a scrap to anenlightened or Self-Aware being, a saint in the metaphorical terms. We maysafely assume that when such a man is left to fend for himself in his ‘silenceand solitude’ liberated from the expectations of the society, he either drownscompletely (suicide) or rises valiantly (awakening) depending on how true heremains to his Spirit in this period of abandonment. By speaking today aboutsuch a saint, in contrast, we now want to focus more on the opposite ‘men ofinaction’ who suffer from a suspension not lack of will, to complete the otherwisesimplest or even mundane tasks, while being continuously a part of everydaysociety unlike such ‘saints in making’.
Curse of thinking and a man’s impotence
“marte haiñ aarzū meñ marne kī
maut aatī hai par nahīñ aatī”
(Ghalib)
In addition to such people who are complete ‘failures’,there are men hanging between the desire to succeed and the overshadowing darkreality of their failure. For such people generally obsessed by the utopianfeats of perfection, morality or happiness – the three prime objectives anycreative person seeks; the on ground result or the end product of his exercise,a substratum of all his efforts, becomes rapidly a theoretical enterprise assuch minds keep on looking for ‘just a start’. Too much thinking without thebotheration of being into that primal act of ‘creating’ or ‘doing’ for that onesecond generates whirlwinds with whirlpools, while he, swooning in between, isforever condemned to drown by the curse of his unyielding yet fiery passion.
It is in fact worse that some of these men are sometimeshailed for their power to take a decision or create, which they know theyotherwise accidentally did. Men, acknowledged and celebrated, for someaccidental or even genuine past accomplishments that except for this fatefulman, the whole world celebrates as his innate power; who simultaneously sitssaddled away in the vicissitudes of his unknown Self, marveling at the processby which ‘it got created through him’. He starts setting up benchmarks forhimself, through people’s opinion of him, people that even don’t belong to him.While the world aspires new creations through him, he still stands lostwandering in the ruins of his own palaces. He thinks, how did it create byitself at all. And because then, the world full of the first set of people whodon’t waste time in thinking, brands him as a creator as it has no time tocheck for the man’s Creative Authenticity, the poor soul is taken back to a manwithin him, seeking completion through his false identities or alter-egos. Heseldom objects externally to this grant of honour for he anyway fails toconclude anything.
He thinks how he likes the false honour. With no Consciouscontrol over this process of Creating, he falls into a circle where heinitially thinks about how could he assume the power to create in the face ofhis discovered sterility; and later finds himself spinning to defend the samehonour of creation. As a result, he chases the creator in him, someone heinherently knows he is not. Thus, begins a self-assumed confidence, thepretense of an expected countenance, a faith that internally eats away hisbones because of its ‘false flabby continuity’, but that which is perceived as’awakening’ by others, who still do not stop to think and investigate the reality.While he seems absorbed in the sole act of creation for months and yearsprogressively, he but only continues exhuming the reality of this ‘utterconfusion of the entire process of creativity’ while his competitors, the greatmen of action, continue delivering things and products one after the other likeindustrial goods.
NON-CONCLUSION
If only he had the courage to look at the act of creation asa little more humanly (based on the presumption that a conscious mind jugglesinspirations into creativity) or even as a by-product or a cross-breed of thehuman and the divine; in all probability, it is fairly possible that suchsterile minds could have helped produce a little more than otherwise. Anycreative product, we can suitably argue, could have been fairly attributedeither to his own intellect or understood as permutations of his well-receivedinspirations. But does such a simple explanation justify the otherwise complexcode of creation, which once understood could blast the reality of the entireuniverse, to such a man. And if that be the case, would he still be evendesirous to continue creating? Would he even survive that truth in the firstplace?
One continues to wonder why cannot such minds cease theirquest of these codes, and more importantly should the quest be ceased in thefirst place despite the unproductiveness it might entail? In sheer confusion,or let’s call it mystery, one part of this man lingers in stinking inactionwhile the other continues rowing towards that ‘perfection’ (that he seeks toachieve) or ‘creation’ (that he just aims to receive) in a journey that oftensoaks away conventional from one’s life, while the entire drama on a worldstage is glorified as ‘eccentricities’ by the sober ones, or adjudged as’cowardice’ by the realists.
The writer is a practicing architect at INTACH, also interested in Visual Arts and Literature.