[Reader-list] breathing exercise 101

[l'enfant stupido]

today was weird.

waked up and found the tree in front of my room go completely bland. last
few leaves. the footpath was covered. walking over it, felt like a dictator.
strange noise of someone crushing a paper inside my head.

went to my research center. colleague asks me to email him a photo of
myself. for some stupid newsletter. i tell him i will revert soon. then, it
struck me that i don't have any digital photo of myself. couple of hours
later, colleague asks for it again. i tell him i don't have any as of now
and could get it in sometime. he tells me that i could even send a group
photo of myself with friends and he could render it. i tell him that i don't
have any digital pic of any sort. he gives me a funny look. maybe, he
thought i am a neanderthal. oh yea. anyone in his early 20s without a
digital foto is indeed a neanderthal. then, i take a self-shot with my
mobile and i mail it to him and thereby, i become the Cro-Magnon man.

*-*-*

kundera talks somewhere in 'unbearable lightness..' about the lewdness of
the music of his times. he calls it 'music minus memories'. Foucault
somewhere talks about 'care of the Self'.

somehow, both of these evades me. and on introspection, i think i
consciously sought out to avoid them at any cost. there must be hardly 10
photos of myself so far - either alone or within a group. dunno why. not
that i hate myself and think that i am un-photogenic. not at all. but
somehow, i was actively erasing myself all these days. determined to unfoot
all the footmarks and die without an identity.

ironically, people who talked so much about 'care of the Self' tread on
self-destructive paths towards the end of their lives. foucault,  roamed and
roamed all over california. went to every gay club and every haunthouse
fetishes towards the end of his life. and died of AIDS and vd. for someone
like Foucault who talked on and on about erasing every single part of his
constructed identity, this is something of an anticlimax. this atavistic
longing, which consumed him in full. what an irony. the atavistic needs of a
hopelessly renowned scholar who ridiculed every ism, every single thing
including scholarship, rationality, archives, academia, intelligentsia,
marxism, modernity/ism and atavism. what a fuckin irony! i am no big fan of
his works, neither do i understand it much. however, i deeply empathize with
the thing which occupied him towards the end of his life.

i imagine of two images and they haunt me. the young foucault, l'enfant
terrible - digging himself in the library amidst huge archives about history
of science and philosophy, the foucault who wrote 'the order of things' and
shook the intelligentsia, the foucault who showed the middle finger to
everyone. and then, the second image of someone roaming on the streets of
california, moving to and fro from one gay club to another, indulging
aimlessly in every kind of divine fetish and dying of aids. with an
unfulfilled appetite. filled with a pressing desire to move beyond the
burden of his self.

and then, there is this third image. which was taken by henri cartier
bresson. the timeless smile of that old
man<http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/c/c5/200px-Ramana_3_sw.jpg>.


*-*-*

sleep beckons. with vivid dreams of a movie - michel foucault is plotting to
kill erik erikson. now. that it something to go rotfl about.




-l'enfant stupido