Examinations

Evaluating and ascertaining the worth of another is our obsession. We want size others up only for the sake of figuring out if we are in any danger of falling in our own eyes. Examinations could have been about testing ourselves, they could have been about realising what we can muster time and time and again. Examinations could have been rehearsals, but instead they are events of finality. We regret your obsession with wanting to know us. You can't operate under ambiguous terms, you have to know whom you are dealing with. But can we look at this obsession of yours more closely? Are you comfortable with putting yourself up for close examination in the same way as we offer ourselves to you? But you say that you never signed up for this. You say that you owe us nothing. But neighbours have a right to pry. Because walls are thin and you cannot afford to insulate yourselves. If they are aware of your existence at all, why not give them real primetime access to your whole life? And that is the moot point, if we are so painfully aware of each other, then how is privacy even a feasible idea? Whom are we going to protect ourselves from? And which is the safe haven that we are going to withdraw to? The urge to withdraw has been variously analysed in the course of our history but we look at it as an impossible fantasy. There is nowhere for us to go. We are stuck with this mess. We can try to block off thoughts inside our head, attempting to run into some clear uninterrupted channel for us to smoke our pipe dream. But there is no clearing available. We have to feel at home right here in the middle of nowhere. The concept of home has withered and exhausted itself and is no longer anchored into a place. We are now tent-dwellers. We also have a weak memory. Wherever possible we will hitch out tent because we can and also because we don't remember where we should go back.

They could have examined the fruits of our passion, the holes in our heart. But they chose to examine the fine grain of our intellect, instead. We do not agree that over time the intellectually rendered feeling is more reliable and that the texture of simple emotion is simply untenable. We have felt and feeling has often guided us better than logic and we have to find a way of puncturing logic with feeling. The constructs of logic can allow feeling and feeling can in turn trigger logic. Logic is a kind of feeling that has internalised fear. The fear of going wrong, the fear of losing track, the fear of coming up with nothing. If for a moment we allow us to crash to the ground and manage to banish all fear from our mind, then we will be in our most lyrical and lucid element. We need to break down.