Romancing the Unknowable by Atul Singh


The world is floating on a Sea of stories, said someone. And I agree. Are we not just a bunch of stories entangled, intertwined, weaving in and out like endless ant’s paths on the jungle floor. Then when we juxtapose our’s on those of another individual with whom we may have crossed paths, it gets fascinating, doesn’t it. Sometimes there is resonance and at other times discordant notes arise. With some people our paths i.e stories even merge for a little while, while with others they just intersect. It is a giant spiderweb of paths that we took, of stories that we lived all around us. If only there was a way of zooming out and seeing all of it play out. Perhaps it is possible to cultivate this perspective in our minds eye.
  It’s all fascinating and beautiful. Perhaps even worth reflecting upon on a rainy day.


There is an expression among scientists of the serious kind. They say that it is as if we all are sitting on an island of knowledge and past the boundary of it lies the Ocean of unknown.  As the island of knowledge grows, so does our boundary of unknown. For example, until in our understanding, an Atom was the smallest unit of matter, our island of knowledge was of a certain size. Now when we know of subatomic particles/fields like Quarks and Gluons we learn that we do not know enough about how they interact with other particles and so on. So our island of knowledge increased and so did the boundary of unknown. But this type of unknown can be investigated. It can be looked into and understood, eventually. It is fascinating in its own way.


However, there is another fascinating kind of romance that lies in the Unknowable. Of the million turns we took through our lives, the choices we made, we side-stepped many more by definition. There were infinitely more roads we did not take, than those we did. There were more hellos that we did not extend than those we did. There were more connections we did not forge than those we did.  So there are more stories that were not lived, stories that did not get written, paths by ants on the Jungle floor that did not carved. In some odd sort of way, our fascination for stories of others, in books and movies, real and imagined ones may well be a yearning to visit those paths that were left unloved and unlived by us. A love story that makes us cry, a story of courage, a story of danger,  of risk, of abandonment, of hope of valor; all of it, are just choices we left on the table of life that we still somehow want to live and experience.


Consciousness or life-force or God’s breath of some kind pulsates through our being, causing some inert molecules of this or that to experience life. Something causes a chemical soup of oxygen and carbon to start thinking thoughts, imagining future, loving, hating and everything in between. The same Iron lying buried in a rock can only give it reddish Ferrous hue, but in our veins it becomes life sustaining blood. Something or the other is the matter, is it not? God did it is an easy answer of course. Another understanding is that Consciousness pervades the Universe as fundamentally as Space does. Nay, even the Universe exists in Conciousness itself.  That Conciousness expresses itself through individual beings, who are limited in there own capacity. But the urge to know itself more, for which it manifests individual beings, also extends to its insatiable urge for stories. Of paths that were not taken, roads not traversed. And so it seeks to live more, experience more through our urges to visit stories. Not just stories of others or of what was. But also of what wasn’t and but could have been. 


No one really knows or can know the truth of it all. But there is Romance in the Unknowable for sure. In visiting paths that never got taken.

Comments

  1. I think you picked the right phrase 'romance of the unknowable'. I must say that at some instances in your passages (writing), I smiled, and at other instances, I was sad. There were instances I was received too lol!

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