The full circle fool

He was just an ordinary boy, but he never made many friends. He kept himself to himself most of the time and made his own world in his head. A world made of thoughts and words and strings of logic. And here he lived, in the tortured labyrinths of his own accidental design, deep behind his eyes. He thought and he walked and he walked and he thought until soon, his step was a thought and his thought was a step.

He had not always been this orderly in his thoughts. When he was still growing up, he was a rather confused kid. He was perennially lost and people made fun of him. The problem, he kept telling himself, was this. His head was sometimes like a glass bell-jar full of all the flies in the city, as if somebody had collected them all and put them inside that bell jar. The thoughts, like the flies, were buzzing around in chaotic patterns, dizzying in their excited scramble as they toppled over and crashed into one another, their trajectories crisscrossing and intersecting in unbelievable complexity while they fed, excreted, mated and did whatever else it is that flies and thoughts do, all inside that glass bell-jar that was his head. It was such a confused tangle that he sometimes had trouble latching on to one seemingly linear thought, and often succumbed to the temptation of letting it all go and just marveling at the noise inside his head.

But nowadays, his head had quieted down a great deal, and he could see clear images and visions in his head most of the times, and he could speak intelligent sentences.

Almost too often, he smiled to himself as if he just remembered a joke, though many times, he himself did not understand clearly what he found funny in what he saw. Sometimes, it was simply some stark irony or a cliched phrase that had a funny connotation in that context, an accidental parody or pun, if you will. After a point, people around him stopped bothering to ask him why he laughed. He was just a weirdo and that was that.

He was by no means a dull or uninteresting fellow. In fact he considered himself to be more humorous than many people he ran into every day. He knew it and he didn't deny it. That realization was not a pleasurable indulgence for him, not even a humble congratulation to himself. It was more a matter-of-fact self appraisal. If there was one thing our friend tried to do with the most sincere earnest, it was to consciously crack the layers of conceit, its cousin narcissism, their seed, egotism and its seed, the ego, as and when he noticed them forming a crusty disc of occlusion in his mind. He was almost religious in his pursuit of this. But still, he couldn't help smiling when he noticed that most people he knew thought he was egoistic. All of those times, he had said "Fuck" and then he had laughed harder at where it led him, sometimes walking that almost recursive  and contradicting garden path of self involvement and wanting to see where that boundary between being a cold observer and a passionate defender of the 'self' would blur and wondering if he would be able to tell.

Oh yes, there was another pastime that he had - hunting down delusions that people built around themselves for whatever their self serving purposes might be, and methodically breaking them down. He reveled in the crashing of a wall that someone had built to shield them from some fear. He rejoiced when sudden and sweeping changes were brought in that shook people out of their comfort zones and their warm corners of lazy complacence, where they slept in their make-believe slumbers believing that nothing's the matter outside the door. In this holy pursuit too, he seldom discriminated between the opposites. The rich and the poor, those who mattered and those that didn't, the good and the evil, the them and the him, they all had their delusions, and in that, they were all equal, they were all equally weak. Their purposes might be different, but they all relied on their personal version of reality to get through their day.

People hated him for it, because it made them uncomfortable. They felt vulnerable with him, almost like lying naked in a doctor's examination room. And he was sensitive to it too. So, of late, he refrained from vocalizing his thoughts. Especially when he felt the person could not handle the truth. And that was why he loved those that could handle the truth. Even more, the ones who could stand to hear the truth and enjoy the simple humor when their delusion was broken. And that was why he had very few friends. He found people with a pursuit similar to his own - searching and destroying false realities, enchanting and addictive. He knew only one such person and that guy was better at it than our hero was. He loved him immensely for it with not a tinge of jealousy. It was an honest, open appreciation for his sparkling intelligence. In him, he often saw his own reflection and each of those times, he felt as if he had gained an amazing insight into himself.

Our hero was not a particularly hostile person, but generally he was considered cold and unapproachable. Sometimes, he considered himself to be that way, and he didn't know how to fix it, or even if he wanted to fix it. So he just let it be; to remain as one of those things that he might never find out about himself.

He was prone to a zillion other flaws too. He was prone to irritation. Many things irritated him. Being an irritable or irritated or irritating person in itself irritated him no end, and even the word 'irritate' irritated him. The way it sounded irritated him. Most of all, people irritated him. People who had a fixed view of the world, people who refused to see logic, fundamentalists, people with a steadfast ideology that their egos refused to give up, people who did not ask unnecessary questions, people who were scared to think and wonder, people opposed to the idea of expanding their mindspace, people who desperately needed to get to some conclusion or cause or understanding or some belief in such a tearing hurry that they had no time to savor the beauty of that path of logic. No time to even check if the conclusion was right or if they were feeling better with their new found belief. He found all of them cowardly.

Belief was another thing that he had issues with. Maybe he was scared of belief. In some ways, a belief was a commitment. It was a commitment to oneself that, if it was strong or blind enough, all of one's thoughts and actions in that regard would have to revolve around its assumed truth. He did not like that. What if there were more intelligent beliefs out there that he had not seen? The thought nagged him. It worried him so much that over time, he gave up belief. He lost his belief in everything and even began questioning the authenticity of his own experiences and perceptions. Sometimes, even in basic things like gravity. He even dabbled a few times with stuff that altered his perception temporarily.

That loss of belief felt like something inside him had died. He felt a tangible sense of loss. He completely lost passion in everything. He was devoid of interest in what he did or what he could do. He became cynical of most things. He became condescending towards people and their beliefs, their loves and their hates. He started hating himself. Most things did not matter in his life. People did not matter much in his life. Likes and dislikes did not. What he got or who he was did not. He got more and more accepting and tolerant of things around him, of himself. At first, he had enjoyed the feeling of liberation that a man without a belief suddenly experiences. Over time, that edgy high had faded away and the cold emptiness of a man without a belief had pervaded every cell of his body.

He tried to hide that emptiness from the world. Whenever he spoke, it was with a false sense of seriousness. He spoke with a phony air of dignity. He spoke with fake enthusiasm, with spurious beliefs and hollow convictions, hoping that people would be too self-absorbed to notice it, or that it didn't matter much as long as the job at hand was done.

Soon, he started envying people who had a passion. He felt jealous of people who thought they had a purpose. He felt inferior to people who had an unshakeable faith in something. People with a belief started irritating the hell out of him, but he masked it with friendly jibes and veiled rebukes. At the end of the day, the emptiness remained. He had battled so hard to win nothing, he thought. And he had won it, he had won nothing and he was not happy! It made him laugh a hard and bitter laugh.

He sat down one day, and wrote the sad story of his universe that existed in his head in a way that he thought might be funny if he got to read it many years later. And after he was done writing it and then reading it many times over to make sure that it was, to his eyes, perfect, he realized that of all the funny things that he saw around him that he could have written about, the poor old fool had chosen to write about himself. Once again, he started chipping away at the crusts of self-obsession inside his brain.

The Nothinger

Chapter 1: Voices and signs

That day, the dawn seemed to bring with it, a special meaning for him. He saw signs everywhere he turned. He had been seeing them for a while now. But today, he felt, was going to be the culmination of that endless search for a map. He was longing to travel.

The world he knew was pushing him out, he thought, joyfully. Or was he pushing out the world he knew, he wondered, in momentary panic. But it seemed to subside when voices in his head told him that it didn't matter. He remembered that until yesterday, such voices in his head telling him things would have left him startled and even a little unsettled, but today, they were calming, reassuring, almost soothing, as if preparing him for some monumental trial that lay ahead. It was a sign, he thought.

He was a lover of logic, a man of science. He was schooled in rational thought. For a while, he tried suppressing the magic of that dawn. He ate his breakfast in numb silence, alone as usual. There were butterflies in his stomach. He did not know why and it bothered him. He tried to ignore it, but it wouldn't go away. His inquisitive mind kept asking 'why', and after a few times, he had to relent to the urgency with which his entire inside was trying to come to terms with the unknown. Just to quiet himself, he made up a reason. Something so utterly trivial, something his mind would have tossed in scorn a few moments ago, that he couldn't help smiling. He remembered it was the first time he had smiled that day. In fact, it was the first time he had smiled honestly that whole week. He smiled even more. He saw a sign.

But his reason, or perhaps, all the smiling, seemed to have helped. His ego was temporarily sated with an answer. After all, the answer seemed to fit into a general scheme of logic. It didn't matter if it was nonsense.

He remembered a syntactically perfect computer program he had written for his bank that did absolutely the wrong thing. The compiler was happy then, he thought. At once, he felt his ego mind kicking defensively against the insult. He smiled again. He was not a machine! That assertion, he recalled, was stronger than the last time. Again, he saw a sign.

He let a few minutes pass. He felt free. He had the power to choose. "There is no compiler", he proclaimed to himself. "I have no syntax", his brain echoed. He remembered reading about algorithms that evolved and mutated with time and experience and wondered if the brain was one such. He felt accomplishment at the thought, and fear at the realization. He wondered if it was even relevant. By the time he had finished eating, he decided it didn't matter. He cleaned up and left for work.