har-ish

Isn’t it humbling that not merely humankind, but the entire biome: Every tree, whale, mushroom, insect and us traces its improbable lineage to a microscopic particulate that didn’t even bother to enshroud its own nucleus?

Before kingdoms, consciousness, memory or meaning, there was simply matter trying to persist. A tiny membrane in an indifferent universe, floating in the primordial dark  that was dividing, adapting, becoming. Perhaps all of life is just that ancient accident continuing its improbable journey, one cell at a time.

Different trajectories, different velocities, different colours: Each moving with the quiet certainty that it has a direction of its own. Yet beneath the apparent order, paths begin to converge, cross and obstruct one another. Perhaps collision is not the failure of a journey, but an inevitable consequence of everything in motion.

Our windows are different, and so are our versions of an event. Time changes the view. What is reality today may be mythology tomorrow.

Everything is anything, and anything is everything. A Zen circle of enlightenment becomes a squid ring; a squid ring becomes a circle; the cerulean blue of an imagined ocean becomes the thatched roofs of some distant village. Perhaps form has no fixed identity at all; we simply keep changing what we see within it.
That is the absurdity of life: that we keep trying to find meaning in absurd things, and then become staunch defenders of the meanings we have invented for them. We draw the circle, call it enlightenment, discover a squid ring, and then proceed to argue about what it means. Perhaps the real absurdity is not that things have no meaning, but that we become so certain about the meanings we give them.

This one is an ode to those great naval and wartime films that have always stirred something in me. Movies like Greyhound, The Guns of Navarone, Dunkirk, The Caine Mutiny, Das Boot, Above Us the Waves, these films where the sea is not merely a setting, but an adversary, a theatre of courage, uncertainty and command.
Perhaps that explains the formation. Or perhaps, after several weeks of doodling, I’ve simply started believing I command a fleet. Either way, the ships are assembled and the Admiral is on deck.

I have often wondered what it must be like when a creative urge takes hold of you so completely that you begin to pursue it to the exclusion of almost everything else in the world.
That thought came back to me while watching The Moon and the Sixpence, based on Somerset Maugham’s novel that I had liked immensely. Maugham’s Charles Strickland, loosely inspired by Paul Gauguin, is consumed by an inexplicable need to paint. He gives up comfort, convention, relationships and respectability not because he has carefully chosen a different life, but because something within him seems to leave him no other choice.
There is something both exhilarating and unsettling about that idea. What if the thing you are meant to create becomes more compelling than the life you are expected to live?
I don’t pretend to understand that kind of obsession. But watching the film stirred something in me. I found myself picking up a pen and drawing without really knowing what I was trying to make. I simply wanted to follow the impulse and see where it went.
Perhaps that is what I liked most about Maugham’s novel. It doesn’t merely make you think about Gauguin or about art. It makes you wonder what might happen if, just once, you stopped asking where the impulse came from and simply followed it.

Blue currents drift through a field of restless forms.
Nothing quite escapes; nothing quite remains still.

Inspired by Cronshaw’s Persian rug in W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
Cronshaw tells Philip Carey that somewhere within the intricate pattern of a Persian rug lies the meaning of life. Years later, Philip begins to understand: perhaps life is not a single, coherent design, but a pattern that emerges from its fragments.
I thought of emotions in much the same way: Scattered islands of joy, longing, grief, desire and memory, separated yet somehow belonging to the same inner landscape.
An archipelago of emotions.
Cronshaw had his Persian rug. I had a page and a pen.

Every doorway leads inward, yet the centre remains just beyond reach. Blue corridors, crimson chambers, and a restless field of ochre – an atlas of looking inward.

A thousand restless pathways converge,
Yet somewhere within the chaos, a thought takes shape.