Tag: curiosity

Poetry

Posted on by Aayam Basnet in Musings

Now, words are amazing creations; no doubt about that particular thing. But they are so very hard to control. The speed of thought and the speed of articulation through words has a huge gap between them, and therefore they are out of phase in most instances; not in sync. Now, this poses a huge problem: how to properly articulate words as soon as the thought arises in your head. Looks like words needs some taming to be done.

But when you study words, you tame the very essence of words, they lose their wildness (pretty self-evident). But, within their wildness resides the essence of the beauty of words. Taming them makes that essence vanish, and what you are left with is a colourless hunk of disgusting stew: A tasteless ocean of monotony and gritty sand.

So I don’t. I just let my broken string of words be. I scribble as my thoughts scramble and eventually whatever formed resembles a poem. I do not pay attention to form, style, grammar, etc. as I don’t have the capacity to think so fast and so far. Hence I consider poetry to be that compromise between the gap I mentioned in the first paragraph.

Now, poetry for me began that way, but as every creation of human beings, it has become its own living creature. I wouldn’t presumptuous enough to try to define what poetry for me is: it is just too a huge a concept, a living breathing changing creature that lives in ambiguity, favours layered meanings, and is never really clear, even to the maker.

All I know is that poetry is one of the most sublime ways that I can articulate myself, and I think it is a part of my own identity. I am satisfied with that. I do not want to know the full truth of poetry; I want to discover it slowly, and experience that inexplicable feeling of anticipation and apprehensiveness while swimming in its mysterious depths.

Universe

Posted on by Aayam Basnet in Musings

The universe is an enigmatic beauty. Her infinite wisdom and seductive personality have kept me in an altered high since as far back as I can remember. I have always been stunned by the sublime beauty she possesses, I have been flabbergasted by her eternal pulchritude. That is why I have made it my life’s dream to get to know her, figure out her intimate details, deduce her mysterious ways, and then sigh eternally, as I finally get to know her.

The universe is a singular wonder. A three-dimensional quantized space, riddled different other physical quantities, all connected by the abstract parameter time (that’s kind-of the debated consensus right now). I look out of the window in wonder and try to put the universe into perspective. Immediately, sweat breaks out all over my body, and goosebumps riddle my skin: the inexplicable peculiarity, the seemingly random occurrences, the constant constants, the perfect amount of space, the ever-elusive and ever-illusive hand of time. Then I get even more aroused by my ability to feel such way. I wonder how this came to happen: how I came to happen, how my ability to feel such inexplicability came to happen, and I feel inexorably tied to the universe. I, my thoughts, my mechanisms are as much a mystery as hers. Life is just this free-spirited dance between the enigmatic universe and the inexplicable human, and that is the starting point of everything: every poem written, every story crafted, every painting composed, every musical piece thought-out.

It’s all incredibly vast and connected, a spider web originating from every human and going off into the unknown reaches of human knowledge. Every web depends upon the person to whom the web develops. Some webs might just juggle around the same person, and find pleasure in that, some webs may be spread over a huge area like a fibrous root. And some, which I find the most enticing are those that grow away from the person into the vast unknown. They reach where the senses cannot, they probe the dark mysterious things that surround us, and bright pulses of light come off from those outreaches into the brain of the beholder, and their eyes roll back as an epiphany of the highest degree hits them like a thunderbolt.

Thinking of all this, it makes me feel like I’m at home, it makes me feel full, satisfied, and simply happy: a non-exorbitant, non-ostentatious, non-pretentious kind of happiness; a simple human joy. And that is the true beauty of the universe, I mean the pictures are great eye-candy, but the true beauty lies in the way the universe can make us feel. And that feeling: that high is everything. It is the answer to the “why” for exploration, it is the answer to the “why” for living. It is the crux of human existence, it is one of the primary reasons that humans have come so far.

And all of that brings me back to the first paragraph. And now I see that my attraction to this universe doesn’t have a concrete reason. It is merely an abstract idea, abstract reasons. But that doesn’t imply its non-existence, and thus I am happy. The universe and the exploration of each of its crevasse is a part of who I am. 

26th March, 2020

Explore

Posted on by Aayam Basnet in Musings

Knowledge is a wonderful thing: it is the lifeline of human existence and development, the use of which has separated us from any other species that we know of. But that doesn’t interest me. Knowledge is the holy grail, and it is fantastic, but it is for other more innovative people. For me, it is not the knowledge itself, but the pursuit of knowledge that is of the highest order: the exploration. I am, merely, an explorer.

The quest, the impossible dream of the explorer is thus: fly out to the great unknown and make it known. Then, fly out again to the greater unknown, and try to make sense of it all. This is quite aptly put down by Buzz Lightyear: “To Infinity and Beyond”. Infinity and then beyond it: what a beautiful, paradoxical assertion. In other words, explorers are those diseased with restlessness, those addicted to the beautiful satisfaction, the heavy delightful sigh after discovering something.

I think for the explorer, the ultimate contentment never exists; the mind and the body are never really at rest; each moment is a restless venture for more knowledge—an unquenchable thirst if you may, and that very fact makes the quest of the explorer a kind of melancholic beauty, there is so much to do, so much to know, so much to explore, but so little time. It is like there is a huge field out there, and something precious at one end of the field. The explorer starts at a random point in the field and runs around trying to find that precious thing (not really knowing what the thing is, but running all the same), but never really finds the precious. S/he maps all the places s/he’s been to, and makes deductions (logical or emotional) and tries to go on, and eventually, the body rots away, being another part of the ground, the work unfulfilled, the journey incomplete.

Quite the sad story. But, for the explorer, it is not quite a sad story. Sure, it is tinged with melancholy, a Beethoven-esque torture, but it is kind of a bittersweet kind of story, one that makes you fill up with contrasting emotions of frustration and happiness, primarily because the explorer takes the highest amount of joy in the journey. The destination may exist, it may not. For the explorer, until s/he can get down and measure that abstract destination, it is just another mirage. It is like the journey in a ship to the unexplored lands of the past: nobody knew the outcome; ah, but the adventures in the journey itself were the subject of legends.

And that, I guess, is the biggest part of me: the will to explore.

Scratch that: And that, I guess, is the biggest part of what I believe to be me: the (self-sustaining) will to explore.

26th March, 2020