—Swaminathan S
You feel your eyelids getting heavy, it’s an 8 am class, and the prof hasn’t worked out how to admit people into the meet. You haven’t slept, but it’s the first class of the semester and it’s supposed to be an interesting course, and all your seniors say it made them learn something. As you go into what could very well end up being an “it was all a dream” reveal, let’s say you’re in a chair with a glass of wine in hand, in front of a healthy fireplace that makes you oblivious to the terrible weather outside, and let’s give you a couple of assumptions to make about yourself. One, you realize you haven’t brushed your teeth, but you also don’t want to. Two, every action is motivated by a desire for an expected consequence, and such action, you consider right.
With such unchallengeable axioms done, let’s move on to a few unfounded inferences, about you, of course. You drink water to appease the stimulus of thirst, which you do not want to feel a continuation of. Lately, this kind of conception doesn’t seem to be working too well at predicting your actions. You delay quenching your thirst, and the implication is that you delay appeasing all sorts of uncomfortable stimuli, and this could mean a few things. Perhaps, you have even begun to envision getting out of bed as a momentous turning in the grand self-narrative, and we all know that momentous occurrences are safely couched in the powerful-sounding mythicization of the past or the exciting fantasy of the future. It is all what you definitely will be, or definitely think you may have been, but definitely are not.
Why, then, is there a very missing link? Why, with the passage of time, do simpler and simpler things start to ossify into the skeletal imagination of your own perfection, leaving your flesh and blood to not-so-metaphorically rot in the here and now – sleepless, inadequate, with the uncomfortable mouthfeel of unbrushed teeth?
You could always simply, simply, put down your pen and pick up your toothbrush, but you don’t do it. It doesn’t seem to work that way. With the easy route ruled out, you instead decide to try and envision a lens through which you can make a different sense of the world, and hence, your behaviour, and finally pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
At this juncture, you feel a lack of proper academic interpretive equipment to really forge a rigorous, sound piece of theory, you simply don’t have the words to make the sharpest sense of your impressions. Without such scalpels to serve you, you’ll have to stomp around with general sledgehammers. If you end up brushing your teeth, what’s the difference, right?
Consider the evidence – Your symptoms of inaction have only gotten worse over the last few months you’ve spent avoiding the light of day. This may just be the most you’ve actively thought about something in the last few months, and you wonder why – it must have something to do with the answer to the rest of the question. It must be because you think, at some level, that you have something better to do. If you were a continuously critical and rational being, you would not think that, because that would be a poor definition of rightness. So there must be something beneath the rational veneer that has not been, or cannot be made aware of the benefits of foregoing one marshmallow now for two later, and there must be something, perhaps between both parties of your mind, that keeps motivating the “continuously critical” you to step back for your “autopilot”, something that lets the continuous succumb to the compelling inertia of the autopilot, the autopilot that tells you you’re doing right, because all the feel-good things in your head are lighting up right this moment, as opposed to when you try to attend an 8 am class, perhaps, which is when everything grinds like small glass and shrill voices. Any alternative seems preferable to the ungratifying chafing that the continuous dreams up as part of its perfect fantasy.
If to understand something is to control it, you’re not sure you’ve done either. Tenuous definitions aside, you feel like you’ve knocked around enough words in your head so that when you try to picture the question again, it doesn’t make immediate, familiar sense, but the process itself lends an afterglow that insists that, since you saw all the parts coming together, you’ll eventually internalize the functional whole. And in fairness, that doesn’t seem completely different from what learning something in an important class of an interesting course should feel like.
Design by Navaneeth MS
Edited by Madhumita R
Article 19 