Nothing Natural

Looking out of my wooden window painted white, I saw the brown wooden barks of trees that grew in my garden. The trees seemed somewhat misplaced. A little too neatly arranged. A little less familiar. Rather secluded and hardly reasonable.

And then, I was compelled to wonder if at all things are reasonable. The world seems to be trying so hard to convince me that it is so - that there is something about the human race, with its paramount intelligence and incomprehensible capacity to innovate that makes it, if not special, less ordinary- yet I somehow manage to sneak glimpses of its idiosyncrasies and loopholes every now and then.It's as if there is an apparent human order that is all-pervasive yet somehow there are always elements that are left out of this amazing compulsive and allusive regime. Is it that which we all watch it but don't allow ourselves to see.

At this point, I plugged my earphones into my ears and started listening to Radiohead. And looking at the scene outside of me and simply by myself and my thoughts, I felt as if my mind went into something of a trance. It's that feeling when your mind gets a kick out of nothing, and a heightened sense of everything. The lyrics begin to make perfect sense, the sound of every drumbeat and the strumming of every chord is heard to the extent of being felt and its a state that is purely achieved in the mind. In your mind.That was the state of my mind.

My mind was preoccupied with the thoughts of nature and how we human beings are so detached from it nowadays. How distant we have come to be from our physical origins and how much we would have to change our way of thought in order to bring ourselves closer to nature. And then my thoughts drifted to how that music was so therapeutic to that disturbing chasm between Nature and us.

But then it revealed itself to me, the fact that us and nature are not too far apart. We are nature herself. We may be one of the many million forms she is experimenting with and each one of us is 'natural' as the rest. since we are products of nature's scheme of things (the scheme, from whatever little I understand, is to simply create and flow with things) everything that we think/say/do is eventually an off-shoot of nature and that is how we are mere agents of evolution for nature.

Think about it before disregarding the point of view completely. It is very difficult to separate man from nature. It might be easy to classify plastic and 'artificial' and 'man-made' but I think it to be simply non-biodegradable. And leaving this particular case alone, it may not always be hazardous. Music, for instance. There is nothing natural about it, per se. The instruments were created by man. The sounds were all man-made. Their usage to create sounds and modulating voices to go with the music - what part of all this did 'Nature' teach us?
If you gather enough strength to deconstruct everything, you might be able to realize that even one of the elements - Fire , its creation and controlled use can then be understood as 'unnatural' in some twisted ways.

What I intend to stress upon is that the lines we simplistically draw between Natural and Artificial and correspondingly acceptable and unacceptable may not always be justifiable.

It might be slightly uncomfortable getting used to this idea at first but it might help in maing us all more tolerant and a little more creative.

All the Same

So, I discovered today that certain somebodies in the 18th century British society decided one fine day that they were going to redeem their society of all its dull wit and excite the spirits of what can only assumed to be a rather fatigued lot. They felt the need to publish a set of essays that would be read by a certain class of people with the the objective of making it "part of the tea-equipage." Together they undertook the lofty responsibility that would require them "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality..."

The two gentlemen being referred to in the above lines are Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. They were powerful icons and undoubtedly two individuals who were crucial in the process of shaping what their society's intellectual collective came to be. They were admittedly yet subtly; and rather remarkably prescriptive in these journals, which were known as Tatler and The Spectator. Prescriptive of the code of conduct, philosophical debates to be carried out and perhaps much more than we can even fathom. The journals were seems as educative in many ways and the gentlemen achieved what they claimed to have aimed for - "to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses."

This discovery of this fact made me slightly queasy. Imagine the kind of control the then-society allowed publishers and authors to have over their social and intellectual lives. Being led by a set of individuals and letting them steering your train of thought - what a grave violation! Permitting them to twitch the society's rationality as per their personal aims and ideals made me sympathetic towards the readers of these papers/journals. What a crazy thing it sounds like , to allow oneself to be influenced by something that a set of people should influence them -heh- Wait. What?

And these were the exact thoughts that led to realize that WE are subjects to the exact same cerebral tyranny. Simply that the two minds have been replaced by fancy, layered, structured organizations. And the mediums have developed and changed to great extent. The crux, however, remains that the black and white letters that we lay our eyes on on a regular basis (think newspaper!) are ultimately popularizing their own interests and preferences. They create an image of what they feel should be, which is usually something obviously admirable. What is most admirable is liked by people, evidently. That then, becomes the idealised for the masses. And this merely perpetuates the conceptions of perfection in the minds of people, rather than allowing it room to grow and evolve.

It has, as Russell Peters and other great men have often claimed, been put in our heads by the Media! Articles, adverts, analysis and editorials, are , if we consider the larger perspective, somewhat prescriptive and expect their audience to mould them according to their representations of reality.
And let us just face it kids, we almost always do.

Just saying.
Excuse me, I must get back to reading the papers now.