Moving On
Like a vagrant with a pen, I've moved on once again, my pen and paper as my only possessions. I hope you'll come with me.
My new blog is at: http://motalib.wordpress.com/
Words Are All I Have
Like a vagrant with a pen, I've moved on once again, my pen and paper as my only possessions. I hope you'll come with me.
My new blog is at: http://motalib.wordpress.com/
Posted by Mohammed Talib at 1:56 PM 0 comments
Posted by Mohammed Talib at 4:07 PM 0 comments
I offer an explanation. Distinguish excuses and explanations by the fact that one is an attempt at justification – which I do not offer for my actions; and explanation – which merely make you aware of the full circumstances before you pass inevitable judgment. An excuse is an attempt to plead for clemency –for bad writing there can be none.
My explanation is two fold. Firstly these posts are generated in a specific context and are in response to that context. I cannot explain that context on a blog. I do not wish the world to know what is causing such vagueness in my writing. Instead it is shared in frank conversations, snatched moments, and brief updates, with those who I want specifically to know.
At the same time I cannot contain these thoughts. I have breached the third wall of my mind, and much now comes addressed outwards. I feel compelled to push these thoughts on to paper and to fasten them into some permanence. I compromise, and make a deal with the devil. In exchange for peace in my soul, I deliver you into a blinding fog that will hinder your understanding and hide my meaning. I wish there was another way.
I see these posts and can see through the smoke and mirrors as I read and reread them. They still talk to me. I know what it contains and what it veils. Its precise intentions, implication and effect hit me poignantly. Their context and subtext lend vivid colour to them in my eyes.
In the final reckoning this is why I have a blog. My words speak to me; and if they speak to you I am delighted. But they are written for me. For my own selfish reasons. To explain me to myself. And sometimes the price of that is to write for only one reader.
I hope you understand.
Posted by Mohammed Talib at 6:55 AM 1 comments
They counsel this to make it clear that what I cannot have is one of the things I want most, for the world to be knowable and understandable. For me to always make conscious choices, not forced by the press of events and the tumult of time, but careful, slow, considered and yet capable of creating an ending that is both desired and appropriate. To have a measure, some control over pace, to find life not a slide, forced around twists at increasing speed, loops coming faster and the background blurred in the mist – this is not for me. I am and always have been a slow and rather patient person, a person who believes more in evolution then revolution, that steps are always taken slowly and firmly in a direction rather then randomly and exuberantly stepping over rubicons and into the unknown. The unknown is an anathema, something to be explored slowly methodically mindfully. Not to be charged down into recklessly and boldly, pretending that bravery can substitute for skill.
I understand though now that this preference, this predicament, leaves me vulnerable to those, who understanding my psyche, wish to pressure me. All it requires is to control the flow of events, to make me feel the pinch of the invincible hand of time, to know that I can only take two alternatives: either to yield or to abdicate my decision. I will either give in, coerced by the power wielded against me or I will exercise my right to not play the game. Perhaps this amounts to some sort of strange yield or flight response to stress, not the famous fight or flight, but then perhaps I have been tempered in environments sufficiently different from the primeval to develop a different range of responses.
I have to live in the modern world, of bewildering complexity and infinite variety, where the options and choices of a minute can change the possibilities of a lifetime, where the sheer variety of people can make choices unknown to me, that may through Adam Smith’s hand make choices for me, and where the fluidity of the human condition might make hundreds of choices equally possible or impossible. In this world, I who desires certainty perhaps over many other things, who values stability and fully accepts the role of the dynamic at the same time, who will espouse the mantra that “the only thing that doesn’t change is change” and not accept it except intellectually have to fashion out a niche and to find a way to thrive.
Somehow I survive, perhaps underestimating my own ability to react to forced circumstances, or because of my one single victory – to understand the game of life is a game – with rules, winners and losers but that the rule set does not define the possibilities. That there are options outside the box that I can have recourse to and that the ability to be dictated to is created by the game, and the game can be stopped at any time. Small nuggets of hope perhaps, in this catalogue of despair.
Posted by Mohammed Talib at 11:40 AM 2 comments
And I feel its going down,
Ten feet below the ground,
Im waiting for your healing hand,
One touch could bring me round
I feel we're going down,
Ten feet below the ground,
Its just the way Im feeling.
- Feeder, Just the Way I'm Feeling