Randomness of life

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
— The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe rightly echoed this thought in his seminal African novel, Things Fall Apart. Sometimes, our lives achieve its effect as a collage of hallucinatory, random fragments flapping against our ruins. Their contiguity is all their meaning; the meaning takes into account the ‘randomness’ and discontinuity of modern experiences.

Faced with strange mundane circumstances, for instance, three suitors for a single woman, may be just as purposefully chaotic beneath its skin of deliberateness. The woman in question may ponder over the role of destiny in the situation and even resign herself to a hopeless soul. By this time, her sense of dislocation is real; she fails to connect emptiness with emptiness. Her inner war becomes real, as life imitates art and vice versa with disastrous consequences. It is then that she can put on the persona of a seduced photographer and try to capture the entire meaninglessness of existence. To quote Jean Paul Sartre here, “Why do we need to call a cat a cat?” It is then, the gulf widens, and, people with any serious aspiration towards realism take into account the fact that reality bypasses perspective and logic.

When you realise yourself to be a product of ‘randomness’ you develop a miming way of looking at the world where objects become clear for a moment and then blur, adjacent phenomena get compressed into deep homogeneity and clear outline abruptly turns illegible. One can sense a certain fluidity in the movement and occurrence of mundane objects, when suddenly, we feel all-powerful and enabled to make decisions about even simple questions like finding a soulmate for oneself. Suddenly, the crusty gentleman from southern India plays the role of yuppie gadfly in Mumbai, warms up to your inner life and imminent stagnation.

Meghna Maiti