"These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone, I may be Japanese,"
These are lines from Sylvia Plath's meditation on suicide. Although she did not quite have nine lives like that of a cat, her body of work was frightening, flirting with danger, and giving a sense of some unmatched pathos:
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
She, with this paragraph, gave us a feel of John Koenig calls "onism"- the awareness of how little we are going to experience of the universe. We're never going to experience the joys and horrors of being a Cinderella, nor are we going to be frightfully lavish like the billionaires we sometimes we wish we could be. While expounding the implications of the word Koenig says:
"We all know that there’s no such thing as a tropical paradise, or hell on Earth. That faraway people are neither angelic monks nor snarling grotesques, that their lives are just as messy and troubled and mundane as our own. But like the first explorers, we can’t help ourselves from sketching monsters in the blank spaces on the map. Perhaps we find their presence comforting. They guard the edges of the abyss, and force us to look away, so we can live comfortably in the known world, at least for a little while."
This is an almost sumptuous counterbalancing thought to the melancholy of not being able to experience everything. Transience is the very foundation of our lives- were it not so, we'd either forever be frozen in time or that we shall never be able to experience non-being- both of which are rather frightening prospects.
A Japanese word called "yugen" captures the beautiful, heart-breaking aesthetics of a moment as is- not be be "here" or "there" or "anywhere", without musings of circumstances led you to where you are and devoid of the reaching a sought out destination:
"To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds."
This is how Alan Watts- a champion of a speaker explained the concepts of the religions/ philosophies of the Far-East, in ways better than almost anyone in his generation. He was the person who led me to "Somoku Jobutsu"- the idea that every creature in the world, irrespective of their sentience can achieve "Buddhahood". Perhaps this is why Japanese even have shrines dedicated to the procession for broken needles.
Reflecting on such bathos, it is not simply Silvia but even I might as well be a Japanese
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The two men who are at the forefront of WiseDumb podcasts are Karan Bhatta and Rupesh Sah who are researchers, educators and media personalities. You can reach out to them for a collaboration:
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