The End of Isolation/Introspection Extrospection by Rajesh Barnabas
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So I must confess, I am everything. I am the galaxy of galaxies. Agreed that philosophers have wrongly pointed out the errors of my theorem, that testimony is unscientific, that knowledge only arrives when two or more people can experience it. But I tell you, I am the universe.
I predicted all this, a long time ago. When my liver aches, it isn’t me alone but the representation of some crisis in the world, identity oppressions, take your pick. Not to minimize any and all through blanket monographs, but when my head aches from dehydration, it is because there is a drought in river basin communities, or wherever land deserves water.
I am picking up on the crescendo of egos and centuries of my immediate family, like the sun storms set off electromagnetic malfunctioning on earth days later, I am absorbing the serotonin, hormonal, adrenal glands of my tribe past and present. I can get perfect sleep but if they didn’t, I feel the effects the next day, as if I had been sleepwalking all night; even that would be compartmentalized, contained to the night, but here I am going through the motions during the daylight hours, diminished, in free-fall. I am the American public, the African, the European, the Antarctican.
The oceans are attached to my diaphragm, lungs are lakes, I breathe in and the tide crashes onto the shore, I feel all the pain and promise of each passing second.
Being this here in my stomach, this knot is beyond any particularity, it is of no religion, nor creed, nor ism. When it gets free momentarily, the world breathes easier and we can all get lost in those moments, can’t we?
When they tell me to read this or that, listen to then or there, I find no remedy. I keep hoping for an answer to come, but revelation remains unwritten. The oceans are attached to my diaphragm, lungs are lakes, I breathe in and the tide crashes onto the shore, I feel all the pain and promise of each passing second. When I open my eyes in the morning, only then does the sun rise.
No, this is beyond egotism, ethnocentrism, perhaps existentialism gets to the heart of it… It is a matter of wanting, yearning to be a part of the surroundings, not apart from. This is the exponentially infinite opposite of isolation.
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At any given moment, there are moments within those moments to dissect. July is split into days, days built by hours on the backs of minutes, with seconds and nanoseconds the tiniest species in the solar system. Divorced from this awareness of systems, is the physicality of nature. To feel – is the ability of humans to divide themselves from their own mental creations. Logic and physics are then at odds, mankind and worldkind in disagreement, and physical cells not getting enough nutrients go scavenging for conflict.
During a crisis do we expand upon the nutrient rich cells within us, or do we compress into the most dense and dangerous pockets of the universe, absorbing energy into knots and fists of hyper isolation? Do we crack a window to let air flow between indoor and outdoor membranes of each thought, or do we let love rot?
In order for these membranes to be malleable, to be adaptable, we need rest. Counterintuitively, the more rest we get, the more woke we will be. Our brains and our bodies learn more at night than they do during the day. Intuition is nurtured when the natural processes of the body can undo the toxic structures foisted upon our organs. Biologists refer to the myelin sheath, a protective sleeve wrapped around nerve fibers that quickens impulses and activates neural communication.
So when the tide of humanity rushes in, will it bring new myelin or old? Will our cells be more permeable to love internally and thus externally?
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The child in us must roam free to joke and dance around the enemy, physically and intellectually because they are both the same. Love and hate are the same, we are not separate from the worst. Immersion is the only way, the only method to infect the world with justice and greater peace. When each cell at every moment becomes aware inside of you, only then can you become an authentic activist, only then does your action become the embodiment of love and a justification in and of itself. This resurrection, the specter of revolutionary dust is everywhere now, indomitable.
The radical mind is adaptive always, then, now, never dogmatic. It is unpredictable to the unstudied but predictable to the trees and longevity. Like roots or branches it knows no barriers, moves swiftly; if one passageway is shut down another way emerges reaching out to the sky. It is stealth.
Each thought then is biological, felt deeply, and it is our duty to breathe life into it, here on earth and out there in the universe.
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Photograph by Megha Barnabas
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