Dear Diary: Confessions of Inertia

Ya Lateefu, Ya Lateefu,

My husband told me that tayammum, the dry ablution, the washing of the skin and soul with dust, would not have been permissible with the earth if the beloved Prophet’s (pbuh) feet did not walk upon it. The beauty of this haunts me, drowns my lungs as something outside of my surroundings. Different – just as consciousness is different to matter. The epiphany is beautiful. I need it as fruit to devour, to survive, to transcend above survival in the grip of the darkness I feel inside, falling as I am into that same earth the Prophet (pbuh) walked upon with such purpose, humility and grace. I do not know how to rise to its surface, but keep digging at the dirt to try and find a way. He (pbuh) made the earth move with his steps, but I can only suffocate in it – cannot even become it.

I have watched as an elderly woman cried beside me about the son she lost to illness at an age too soon, and I did not hug her. This haunts me. I have held her a million times in the confines of my thought, sharing her grief as my own, but unable to make my rock-like bones move in reality where it may make a difference. I think about the times I have hesitated due to overthink, running something over in my head so much that my body became stiff. The times I have not spoken when I should have. The times I have not cried when I should have. I despise the way my voice comes out from my throat, barely audible when greeting strangers. The times I have not acted when I should have. The times I have not followed a decision because all I could do was stare into my thoughts trying to find a way to get up from the floor. The peace does not come. I did not call my mother the night I missed her so terribly that I lost myself to a living sleep, but the morning after numbed my brain into the routine of the day. I switch off. I put things off for years. I can put people to the side for a long time, and in that time they live inside my thoughts. I speak to them, apologising, praying for them, hoping that one day perhaps they can benefit from something I have intended although I have not done for them as I should have when required. To just be there for someone is a beautiful thing. I have never underestimated the strength of those who show their faces where they must, as propriety demands. As is a Muslim’s right over another.

For all of these regrets the dear diaries have been trapped inside my head. It is hard to release a great many experiences locked within their time which could not be written in the moment. It is difficult to write when most in need, just as it is difficult to talk to someone and get a grip over the subtleties of tears and madness. My husband holds me and does not give up. It is not good to submerge into water to deal with oneself. It is selfish.

I write now with a stronger hold over my mind than in such times. But the thick of battle offers no mercy. That battle is between one’s life and one’s limbs. I write after it has taken place – in retrospect, missing how the breaths of those moments wheezed out from my throat, how mind-numbing the onslaught of anxiety was. Internal darkness is a reality, not part of a diagnosed state of being, but a hardship with its own reasons that are above and beyond my understanding. But the depth of the heart’s abyss reveals itself in times of sorrow, showing how the human being has a great deal more inside than what the surface of happiness can expose. This darkness is not simply to be sad or in grief or in anxiousness or fear. It is the inability to move. It is inertia that takes over. A great weight bears down on me, as if a huge shadow is holding my body, engulfing my mental and physical form, and hugging tightly my heart. All I want is to have the strength to swing it off me, and by the same movement be able to get up and do something; to do what I should do, to follow propriety, duty, act justly, act mercifully, give myself to something other than this lull,

“don’t fall into a lull,” he says,

this silence, this extended pause, this spiralling thought. Something other than it.

This is not simply a wish, this is a desire, this is a prayer, this is dhikr.

Ya Lateefu, Ya Lateefu,

my love holds the hand of my inertia, rocking it back and forth until I get up with him and pray.

Dear Diary: A Step into the ‘Real World’

I said Qabool and realised that this is an act of ibadah.

I said Qabool and saw the sky turning red, and the gates opening for many, and the world having the potential to come to an end because that is inevitable.

I said Qabool and felt the strength of Allah pushing down on my shoulders as I understood the weight of my responsibility in what I was agreeing to, and felt my whole being ready to fulfil it.

Life has been moving fast. Not ahead of me. But fast. Like this car journey on the first day of Ramadan. To London. For reasons too complicated to explain. Our surroundings are blurred. Cars keeping the same pace as us are normalisers. We’re afloat. It seems as though we’re not moving, but still getting to somewhere important.

Things only feel like they’re zooming when you write them down in an effort to explain what’s going on, for someone to understand how crazy things have been. That’s why it makes sense to me that people write in their pauses. When moods are low, the mind allows you to magnify a water droplet in order to compare it to your tears. People understand such sentiments. Small things, insignificant at other times, but appreciated when you slow down. We can’t handle being aware of too much you see. The mind sometimes switches off all those parts of itself that help compose essays and poems, analyse arguments, verbalise abstract thoughts, form conclusions to theorised notions, or develop philosophies for how the human consciousness can be identified so that we can show people we’re not near-dead matter simply oiled by chemical reactions.

I can’t function as such right now. Life has been moving too fast to think in detail and my body and mind is in survival mode. There’s not much space for analysis. I’m in action. Action is like fighting. That’s what you do in survival mode. You fight or you run. When I look at my legs I don’t think they’re running, so I’m doing the former. Fighting to understand the passages I’m entering while attaining what God has assigned for me. I’ve said yes to fate’s directions. I have found what I’ve been looking for, and I feel the warmth of the gift.

But there’s a lot of stress here. A lot of oncoming responsibility, a step into a new place in life, and each step carries an incredible amount of weight. You begin to realise why it’s necessary to switch off all of the you that thinks too much. If that part of me stayed on I’d be going crazy right now thinking of all the possible ways things could go incredibly wrong.

I’ve only had to deal with negative thinking for brief moments when the stress has overloaded and the practicalities have felt like a slap in the face. A couple of weeks before the big day, I was sitting in a diner with my closest friend having some ice cream to sooth my nerves and telling her that everything was getting too much to handle.

I need to get my life sorted. I can’t be a dreamer anymore. I can’t be me anymore. I need to be conventional. I need to take on responsibilities, act as others do when they’ve settled down and become someone’s life partner, someone’s daughter-in-law, someone’s sister-in-law…

‘I need to enter the real world’.

‘What real world?’ She asked.

‘The real world. Reality.’

‘There is no real world. This is reality.’

I understood.

We don’t just wake up one day and get pushed into the ‘real world’. Just like we don’t wake up one day and suddenly become adults. Despite the way our culture makes it seem so, the fact is that everything is a constant preparation for what’s ahead. If you look to Allah you realise how He has always prepared you to face what’s coming and shown you how to face what’s already here. As humans we’ve been given the ability to adapt to change, but adapting doesn’t take the same form for each individual. Just because I’m taking a certain step in life that most take at some point doesn’t mean I will conform to their conventions or become like them. I can already feel the realisation setting in of what is happening in my life; however I can also feel how life has been teaching me to deal with what’s taking place the way that only I know how, and that’s what I’m doing. The one requirement of me, my being, is that I stay close to Him, grow close to Him i.e. that I please Him, not displease Him.

On one of the occasions I was expressing my worries and what-if’s, and we were talking about rights, obligations and the difficulties a woman faces when leaving home, someone special told me something that stuck;

‘Whatever difficulties you face in future, whatever happens, just remember that where Islam comes in, everything else stops.’

And then he added as more than an afterthought; ‘Don’t stop dreaming.’

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This post stops here, so by all means stop reading if you have better things to do (understandably!), but thank you for taking the time to be here 🙂

A friend sent me a message after reading the above and I felt like it should be shared, not only because of the way in which she related to this post, but also because of the wider issues she thought of which I’m realising a lot of women (mostly of Asian origin) may relate to. Note: This isn’t the full message, just the parts that apply. So here it is;

“Roszeen,

I really enjoyed reading your blog post…I like in the beginning how you related the concept of agreeing to get married to a very weighty description of what I thought was judgment day.

The fear and uncertainty that you felt while at the same time realising this was ‘what you’ve been looking for’, the fear that you felt at having to change to be like everyone else ‘when they’ve settled down’ and the fear of not being a dreamer anymore and having to mould yourself to a predetermined thing, conceptualised and put forward as THE way to be in asian societies; that fear resonates with me. The fear of not being true to yourself, of being manipulated and moulded by backward traditions cultures and family. That is what frightens me the most, not celebrating the way Allah created you in terms of your personality and having to be a robot or in a cult like everyone else.

It reminds me of a quote by mark twain: ‘to wish you were someone else is to waste the person that you are’.

It’s inevitable that you’d feel the emotions described in your blog; fear, anxiety, uncertainty and stress. It’s such a huge new transition in your life that you’re getting yourself into. When you lamented at having to get out of dreaming and becoming a ‘daughter in law’, it reminded me of the conventional norms of the society we live in. Many married asian women I know seem to literally be chained to the kitchen sink and have no time for anything else. They are literally slaves to their husbands family and they have no opportunity to grow or learn.

I’m glad you came to the conclusion that just because your going through a process countless other people have gone through, it doesn’t mean you have to be like them. I’m also glad you realised and linked in Allah towards the end and how at the end of the day it is Him that only matters.”

Self-Expression & the Clear Image

If you’ve read my piece; ‘Twitter-Presence; Identity, Death & Jahar’, you’ll know that questions of identity have been important to me. People rarely acknowledge that categories of identity classed as normal are not ones anyone would accept outside of their cultural and social framing. Patriotism is really an odd concept if you’re in an environment where you’re not reminded of its signs – if it has no real function to your daily existence, as I’ve found in my life. I think that my dad did talk occasionally about a ‘Kashmiri pride’, but it felt more like he was speaking of it out of interest, like he was referring to it as something tangible now only because we’re away from it, something that might be used like a piece of clothing to wear the way tourists wear ‘I heart New York’ t-shirts. They don’t wear them all the time, they change their clothes, but perhaps there’s a sentimental attachment in so far as it holding memories of a place they once visited –maybe a few family members live in New York, but there’s not much more than that.

I don’t know much about our family background and haven’t been taught to love our ‘heritage’ or ‘land’ or ‘country’, but the lack of knowledge of such things has made me interested since youth. In fact, I was quite bitter as a child about knowing nothing of these things. As a result, an interest in the idea of culture developed. Reading fiction hasn’t helped when filling my head with stories of ancestors, family bonds, destinies, blood lineages, inherited character traits etc. But to take an interest in something you still have a detachment. If you really love something you go beyond taking an interest, you own it, it’s yours. But I’ve always treated culture as something interesting to look at; aesthetics, history, anthropology. I’ve held a fascination for traditions, been drawn to tales of conflict, aggression and suffering. I am my own orientalist. Or – maybe not. Because with this kind of thought all ‘culture’ ends up holding the same superficiality if expressed only as outward show, something fake, an unnecessary addition to an individual. What I realised was that – perhaps because I’m so drawn to writing – real culture is carried within the languages people use.

And so, in opposition to the conscious outward shows of expression of a ‘culture’, or an allegiance to something that would label one as ‘a patriot’, I’ve  always found something more liberating in the idea of the ‘self’ – the ‘individual’; something free of a set category, something much closer to the truth of one’s being.

If you spend a lot of time in reflection, in wonder, writing, drawing – if it’s something you’ve become accustomed to since childhood, you’ve already made yourself very aware of a self – unpolluted by the tyrannies of social flows. You learn how to let your self speak out freely in whatever way you’ve found. Artistic expression today is centred on this. People find themselves and try to make their life more bearable (beautiful even), expressing things people generally don’t want to sit and talk about. You can lay your soul bare on a social media platform, a canvas in a public art exhibition, on a stage blinded in your spotlight.

You realise through the expression you’re able to justify the behaviour that has put you on the edge of acceptance for so long. It’s such a vengeance. Anthony Anaxagorou’s; ‘The Sadness of Art’ comes to mind (http://anthonyanaxagorou.com/post/33585598795/the-sadness-of-art). In fact, I remember reading his piece and feeling so justified afterwards. I don’t even know how to describe it. It just felt like finally not being an oddity anymore. Actually – it still felt like I was an oddity, but I didn’t despise myself for it. I remember someone saying to me jokingly once; ‘You’re weird, you know that?’ And I thought to myself; yes – I am – but wait till I’m comfortable with it. That was my ego. In fact, all this self talk is perhaps from a dark place.

A lot of my expression really kicked off from Hip Hop. I don’t go out of my way to hide my previous obsession for it during childhood to teens. It’s not like an unspeakable part of my life or anything like that. What’s actually happened is that I don’t think much about it anymore. You may find my mention of Hip Hop hard to understand – an odd thing to connect to someone like me. The problem with today is that Hip Hop has so many false connotations attached to it; it’s shown as a joke. I came across a lot of middle-class snobbery at university where students only knew it as far as their stereotypes – and I was personally offended by their talk. I don’t need to be an African American born in South Bronx, New York to be offended. Hip Hop knows that because if you ever listen to any serious artist speak on the subject, they’ll tell you it’s all about being comfortable with you. Confidence is key. If you want more insight on that check this speech by Lauryn Hill; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1cq0bhSrq4. And if you want to know about Hip Hop as an art form, check her spoken word; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpXJs3CtDfE. While you’re at it, you can also look at the likes of Amir Sulaiman, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) and Suheir Hammad.

Who now remembers the roots of Hip Hop as a flow of culture that didn’t even know itself, before the superficial categorisations that come now? Like a flower growing out of the brickwork – like The Rose that Grew from Concrete. I’m not even talking about music; I’m talking about kids on the street rhyming about their day because it’s the only way they felt some kind of agency in their lives. I’m talking about identity ownership in political lyrics and writing and graffiti, where downtrodden people rebel against hegemony and create their own narratives.

Anyway, I haven’t talked like this in a long time. I just want to show you that I’m writing about a Hip Hop very different to the one you’ll probably have heard of. This is the ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’, Def Poetry Jam, Amiri Baraka, ‘I am not my hair’ kind. At 15, I read Tupac’s poems published in ‘The Rose that Grew From Concrete’ with only one thought in mind; I can do that. When I started writing I was in contact with people who were also doing the same thing. The Hip Hop base of poetry doesn’t really talk abstractly in the same way as contemporary poetry. Unlike postmodern poets, Hip Hop artists run on rhyme. What the culture also does is centre itself very much on hyperbole. The way you write is from feeding off other people’s work, you find your mind working to play with language in a way that specifically shows your skill in metaphors, rhyming that doesn’t sound forced and of course – at the highest end of Hip Hop lyricism – references to politics and popular culture. It’s all about leaving the onlookers silenced. When you have people to compete with, the interaction improves the writing and performance. I was never good at the performance part, but the written stuff; rhyme, referencing and metaphors – I used to enjoy a lot.

Away from the hyperbole, what I also realised was that Hip Hop spoken word artists would play on the emotions of their audience. Their subject could be something personal, but it was heightened in such a way that purposely brought about an emotional response. If they talked about history and politics and culture, they would sometimes romanticise certain concepts. I had a conversation with someone not long ago which began with them asking me about whether or not it’s right for an artist to want to ‘feed off’ an audience or have the audience impact their art. And is it right if the artist manipulates the audience’s emotions? Sometimes such expression becomes an intoxication to find something new to be moved by. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that – I haven’t figured that out yet – but it becomes a problem when the thing we’re moved by is our own pain or insecurity, when that becomes an addiction. With this conversation, the self-expression I had always held up as righteous was for the first time being questioned. At first I fought it, I said that artists use the emotions of others to enhance their creativity, that the artist can be moved by his/her audience or the people he/she is creating for by taking their stories and making them into a piece that others can relate to. I also said that artists can’t stand on their own; they come up with their best work by feeding and in competition. And I said to myself that there is beauty in being able to justify one’s own cuts and bruises, in seeking vengeance and helping others to acknowledge themselves. There’s beauty in trying to enhance one’s abilities by seeking to perfect the word so that we can be moved every day.

And then I had to take a step back and think about my own writing and the reasons why I stopped finding peace within it – which is what happened when I became too involved in the concept of mastery over something that was essentially meant to be about sincerity, not self-indulgence.

I stepped away from a lot of stuff. Or actually, a lot of stuff stepped away from me. The ability to write had actually left me not long after I moved away from Hip Hop. Hip Hop was replaced by contemporary poets and literature. I thought the fault was that I was no longer seeking the same inspirations that made me want to better my writing technique, and that if I went back to the lyricism and trying to compete maybe I’d be able to pick up again, but I realised that it felt empty. None of it was me; I was trying too hard to make an identity which didn’t fit – something I previously resisted.

I considered all of these things. I also considered what I loved about the artists from contemporary poetry and literature whose words impacted me, what I was drawn to in their art of expressing and trying to make people feel profound things. I realised I had gone to the excess and I wrote an article which I decided not to publish on here because most of it was half-thought and not well articulated – as much as I tried to make sense of what I was trying to say. But here is an extract;

 ‘The emotionally intelligent, the artists, the poets, the writers, the ones creating those things which cut through you and send you spiralling in awe – do you know how much they’ve got you idolising their creation? I know that passionate mind-set very well. You almost want to be crushed in the strength of human expression because you feed off it. You want to feel something deeply. You need fine concepts, abstract ones that can’t fill in their own spaces and don’t want anyone else to either. The leaders of this movement masquerade as the intelligent, the elect, the darkness, the misunderstood understanding. They’re the ones who weave to you those stories you go to bed with. They’re the Majnuns of this time, forlorn in the effort to call out to Laila. You’re in love with their tears.

They want everyone to read their poems. And they love their scars.’

This was to me a poison of the nafs – the self – in a form that had completely gone unnoticed in my understanding of things. It was a self-indulgence that not one of the artists I loved could have told me about. Most of them don’t want to believe in a greater force, in God. And just as the rest of post-modernity, their art is what takes the place of morality, love, humanity, goodness – making up for the lack of certainty that the human by nature desperately needs. I felt like I had been playing with something dangerous. When it revealed to me its own loneliness – which is all there is to self-indulgence – and its road away from genuine help which is nearness to God (the only One always there when no one else is) I just didn’t understand what was left as an identity to hold onto when I had to cut out the things people normally find grounding in (first culture and patriotism, and now artistic self-expression).

My reaction wasn’t to say that I had completely removed artistic expression. I don’t think I could ever do that. But what I found was a truth; people can find themselves in an unhealthy addiction and false identity, even if they’re trying to oppose those things. But not many people will understand this, because most of us don’t know how high the bar can go, we think we know the expanse of the sky, but we don’t. We actually do have the ability to purify ourselves; an attestation to this is the stories and teachings of those saints who came previous to us. It’s just that we don’t know how. And if you think you can’t relate to this post and I’m just talking madness about artists etc. then please understand that most of us are clinging onto meaningless identities, desires and ego-boosters. And we’re all addicted to something – if not many things – it’s just a case of figuring out what it is for you individually.

I’ve started at page one again and am writing from scratch – this time trying to lessen the control of the nafs, instead trying to find the best way to describe the real essence of things. The truth is that individuality and expression is a God-send. But there’s no better identity than a clear mirror – which is the ultimate aspiration for every human being. The identities we get told we are or should be are like a fog over the clear image. What you’ll find is that it’s far harder to try to remove the unnecessary – especially when you’re trying to grasp what the unnecessary actually is. And the hardest thing in the world is trying to reconcile that clear image (of someone at one with God) with the baggage of this life.

I haven’t meant to attack the vulnerable artist here – far from it. It’s that artist’s disposition that will give them a new way to find Him. It’s just that when you’ve found your passions you have to direct them to the right path. And the final destination of elevation is to only have one passion; the passion towards Him – to want to know Him – which I don’t know how many of us will get to without also having passion for other things. But one thing I do know is that a person who is weakening themselves in a sincere love – even if in excess – is much easier to correct in their object of love (like what happened to Hafiz). It’s much easier to straighten such an individual than someone with arrogance, pride, or who is in the enjoyment of fitting in via superficial categories of identity. In sincere love, people try to do something they genuinely believe is right. And in a selfless love people don’t try to hurt others, which is what I think makes the difference.

Anyway, as an endnote; this post was actually meant to be about individuality, self-expression and hijab, but took a life of its own! So I might write about that next time. You may or may not agree with what I’ve written here, which is understandable because I’m not sure how many would share these views. But whether or not you agree, if all of this makes complete sense to you then you’ve accomplished more than I can at this current point in time. Maybe you can teach me.

On the Disposition for Seeking Knowledge

This post looks at disposition in the way in which people approach thinking about things. And yeah, this is very basic and began as a random thought along with other random thoughts I have, and so I felt to share it. Perhaps through this post you’ll understand more about the way I think, and I hope you’ll start to question the way you think as well. Also, please note that none of this is concrete, none of it is scientific. This is pure hypothesis (with a dash of creative license). I like to take ideas and run with them, sometimes I run too far, but it’s an enjoyable experience anyhow. But yeah, whatever you find questionable, problematic etc. please share that with me. If you’re thinking with me, then share with me what thoughts you can connect onto this, what things you’d like to add in this ever flowing interaction of human knowledge. I’d be happy to know.

So yeah…I’ll get on with it!

The ideal way in which people – in my understanding – think about any issue is that they have a centre of knowledge (however small) about that issue which they feel certain about, the image below shows this in the darker region in the middle. And then surrounding that certainty is the grey area which at its various gradients represents certainty fading into uncertainty. The fading grey of uncertainty isn’t a negative phenomenon. As human beings we can’t possibly walk around certain of everything in life, if that were true we couldn’t learn anything new because there wouldn’t be any room – any fading grey – which would take on new ideas to change the dynamics of what you know or feel certain about regarding that issue. The fading grey allows for the centre certainty to grow bigger when you feel more certain after having learnt more. While the centre black could get bigger, the fading area could also get bigger as you come across more and more questions in the quest for knowledge about that issue.

More interestingly, the fading grey allows other thoughts to build into it because uncertainty means you naturally want to fill the gaps of your lack of understanding about the issue, and so you’ll explore and find some new issues to add to it.

Let’s imagine that in your thoughts you have countless other issues which inhabit their own areas inside your mind, each one has that same black certainty with its fading grey around it. Imagine countless numbers of these floating around in your head. Perhaps then, as you learn more, you develop your certainty and uncertainty until it comes in contact with another issue because you find that they both have links. The two issues then join each other. But because this is a new link, they are joined here (as seen below) by the faded area. Perhaps they will continue to remain joined by a faded area because you cannot find any links between the two which are stronger than this.

So again, above we have two separate issues. You have found a link between them, although the link is quite faded, and so what you see here is that all of your grey area understandings about the two issues have links which could progress further. The more you learn about the two the more they could link into each other.  Perhaps the link itself becomes more certain to you and you find more in common between the two issues, and so the darker areas of certainty of each becomes closer and closer connected.

Above, I have explained in a very simplistic way, the way in which knowledge of ideas can interact. I apologise if this is confusing, I’m actually not altogether that fond of using diagrams and thought I never would for one of these posts, but here I am! To make it clear, when I say ‘issue’, I am essentially talking about a ‘thing’ you know, an entity of knowledge e.g. cats. The black area could be all the things you know are true regarding cats, and then the fading grey are all the things you are less certain about.

But the main point I’d like to bring forward in regards to an individual’s disposition regarding the things he/she knows requires only that you understand the first picture. The dark area which is your certainty and the fading grey which is your uncertainty combined are the ideal of how your knowledge about an issue should look. Why is it the ideal? Because human beings are not meant to walk around completely certain as this leads to an inability to grow – as previously stated. If we were brought onto earth with full certainty then what would be the purpose of this life?

The interactions between each issue are varied; the depth of the certainty, how big it is, how wide the expanse of the fading grey – all of these things relate to the experiences of the individual and their approach to knowledge. The actual creation of an issue itself is largely unique to the individual as it is because of your experiences that you’ve decided to lump together specific understandings or knowledge into a category or issue. The best example of this is when you look at the way in which a school teaches things placed into specific subject areas – you have Maths (one issue), Science (another issue), etc. The categories you’ve created in your mind, however, are much more complex than to be able to put your knowledge under neat little labels. A lot of the information we carry is subconsciously understood, it becomes like common sense, you don’t think about it on a conscious level.

Anyway, life makes you question these categories, these issues. Before you know it perhaps the certainty you carried about a created issue gets cut in half because you’ve found out that parts of it are not true. This would lead to an increased fading area surrounding the certainty, your dark centres become smaller, an erosion has occurred. Perhaps your certainty about one issue grows to such an extent that it completely overtakes another issue. Perhaps you lose your certainty completely, and that area becomes fully faded.

The disposition of a person has a huge impact in their knowledge-seeking. The dispositions among Muslims which I have personally come across at their extreme are of course stepping into self-destructive tendencies. I will explain how that is…

While we have the ideal form in the first picture above, we also have certain dispositions of the Muslim (in his/her quest for knowledge) which are not balanced in the seeking and holding of knowledge. Certain dispositions are inclined towards completely eradicating the fading grey as a goal which goes beyond the human desire to find the answers to the uncertainty. The goal here is not to seek knowledge and expand, it is to close up and not learn, but retain a set limit of information.

The main focus of Muslims with this disposition is that they want only what is certain (highlighted in the red box: above left) until all that remains is a black box (above right). The consequences for their approach to knowledge are profound. What they have left is a box of certainty which is rigid because the thoughts inside it regarding that issue do not allow for any growth or  spreading out. They don’t allow for any new thoughts to fade in, or any thoughts to grow out. What we have is something inert. The search has stopped, and the individual does not want anymore, perhaps the individual is unsettled by anything more, perhaps in accordance with that individual’s ego or insecurity no more must be gained and they could well believe that no more can be gained.

What happens then when life makes them doubt the certainty of this closed off black box which carries only their certainty? Well I couldn’t say all the aspects of destruction that might cause, but perhaps what they’ll be left with afterwards is the opposite of a fully black box; a fully grey one (below).

Complete uncertainty isn’t a desired thing. You’re left unbalanced, insecure to take on any knowledge, not sure what to believe in, confused and falling completely astray.

Obviously the above is simplistic and demonstrating absolute extremes. Individuals of the rigid disposition are unlikely to have their knowledge tied into a neat little box, but I hope I have metaphorically demonstrated the idea of the rigid disposition of someone unwilling to search for more knowledge or question their existing. I believe that what we have to do is allow ourselves the faded grey around the boxes of certainty. The certainty in the first instance should be that which we have built up with complete sincerity, in search of guidance for more knowledge. With such an intention it would not hurt the soul when you find that specific things you’ve been certain about were not true.

Don’t fear having discussions with others which could change the dynamics of the things you know and provide you with further depth, further growth and understanding. We go looking for clean-cut answers, but that is not the nature of life. So I’ll say again, don’t fear the grey areas around your certainty, they are nuanced in the thoughts they hold, they bring about interactions with the world because the grey areas are full of questions and possibilities, they also provide spaces to understand more about an infinite reality. Closing the box off leaves you with a definite finite. And when you think about all the knowledge there is in the world – we could not possibly attain all of it, therefore why would we at any point in our lives look to close ourselves off from what time will allow us to attain?

Lastly, I am by no means stating that we should be completely free and unrooted, because as you can probably imagine that grey box is not where you want to be. Rather, the disposition needed to seek knowledge should be balanced in the way in which the certainty and uncertainty co-exist. Allah has, after all, blessed us with minds to learn. Allah has not, however, told us the limits of these minds. And so to us they might as well be infinite.

Twitter-Presence; Identity, Death & Jahar

 

I missed a lecture called ‘Identity after Jacques Derrida’ while trying to catch up with other assignment work. But I have the slides on a printout we got given in the intro lecture. I actually had wanted to attend this lecture because the concept of identity is fascinating to me, but looking through the slides I can’t help but sigh to see that they don’t actually offer any answer except to say that no one really knows what identity is. In social sciences there’s this thing called fragmentation and it’s words like that that make me realise my ideas were always somehow linked to social sciences even before I knew anything about the field.

Anyway, I took out a book on Derrida from the university library – not so much because I wanted to look at him, but more because I thought I could include him in my assignment. I decided I wanted to write about identity because I don’t know where to start with it and my assignments tend to come out better when I approach them in a state of conscious ignorance because I tend to do a lot more research to try and make up the difference.

I read a few pages of it and got the impression that this Derrida guy was a rebel – not really the cool kind, but that’s just my opinion. Now I’m not going to try to act like I know much about this guy, I’ve only read a little and I’m sure someone who knows about Derrida will definitely know more than I do, but I had to take out of it what struck me. Actually the book has a weird format, it’s called ‘Introducing Derrida’ and it’s filled with text bubbles, cartoon images and a section on zombies (which is relevant to Derrida’s work, but I won’t go into that here). Here’s the bit that I wanted to bring up;

Writing depends on absence

Its characteristics oppose presence. Metaphysical thinking has to eject it or subordinate it. –p.51

As a self-confessed introvert I looked at this and thought about myself. I mean I speak in writing. That’s what I do, so what does that say about my presence? But then I started to think about this in a wider context, in terms of social media and the fact that we all recreate ourselves in the way we communicate on Facebook, or, more interestingly, on Twitter.

I’ll tell you why Twitter is more interesting. Facebook consists of your social network, or the individuals you choose to bring into your circle. Despite the complaints regarding privacy on Facebook, the fact is that it is mostly focused on your personal cyber-reality and not in a public space other than to the extent you want it to be i.e. if you want to keep your profile or photos open to the public or not. Unless you’re a cyber-stalker who therefore does not make conventional use of the cyber-structure of Facebook in order to have it represent you – say you have a cartoon for a photo and a timeline consisting of shared generic quotes or Farmville updates – unless that is your cyber condition, or indeed you’re promoting a business, a music page etc. you’re most likely using Facebook to keep together a specific and selected social circle. Twitter on the other hand is structured completely differently, and part of this difference is the way you are able to connect to the wider (cyber) world.

Twitter consists of ‘wordbites’ that are essentially meant to represent you. The character restriction allows the importance of the written to capture attention in a much more fundamental way than on Facebook where you will most commonly find a friend venting through a ream of words regarding a personal matter – looking into which would most likely make you cringe. Twitter on the other hand often consists of these wordbites of thoughts that are easily accessible and most often (meant to be) representative of people who you do not know personally. There is a great deal of political potential in Twitter, not just from politicians with accounts campaigning for votes, but also if you believe in the notion of the ‘personal being the political’. As well as this it can either be regarded as a machine through which people can pump out generic quotes or news articles which add to the banality of the first world, or a subtle shaper of social understandings as we decide which streams of wordbites we choose to gaze upon on a daily basis, and also which out-there indirectly linked groups of individuals we choose to follow, because after all there are options on Twitter to follow people similar to those already on your list.

Going back to the idea of wordbites being representative of an individual, this is where I would like to expand on Derrida’s idea, and perhaps contradict his views. But I said expand in the first instance because I get this impression from the book of him being an individual who wished to destroy foundations in order to show that those foundations were created and not indestructible. So I don’t know clearly if this is a contradiction. But consider for a moment the image of the cyber-reality of wordbites consistently being vomited out by the millions occupying Twitter, each of them tweeting numerous tweets, tweeting in the presence of the occurrences of their lives. Now think about reading tweets like;

My brain is too saturated right now

Or these…

It’s hot, but not proper proper hot and it’s slightly windy. I like it like this, I’d hate it if it was BOILING. Hay fever is a b***h

79% batt now…..had 98% at 11.35

Loool Simpsons never fails to make me laugh

UKIP’S POLITICAL BROADCAST HAS ME ENRAAAGED.

I want bubble teaaa

Even if slightly, can you feel the presence of these individuals? And I don’t just mean because of the sense of the actions in these examples (if they include actions), or the present tense of the wordbites which means you still feel them even though time may have passed since they were tweeted, or because of the speech-like language used as opposed to the formality of book-text, or indeed the fact that you may have read such tweets as they came onto your timeline, essentially reading them within seconds of them being tweeted. I don’t mean just these factors. Presence comes about in the overriding sense of living which is behind the tweets of the individual you come across when you run through his/her personal timeline. Of course there are generic twitter accounts, and those dedicated to news or quotes etc. However, the majority have a sense of a living individual. You could say this completely destroys the notion of the absence Derrida was perhaps referring to when talking about the characteristics of the written word.

In fact, is this kind of presence more present than the 3-dimensional (for want of a better term) existence because it is all we can imagine of the individual?

By asking the above question am I going to get a response of sympathy from someone outside of the twitter generation saying we have no idea how to socialise anymore? Or saying that we have lost our ability to communicate, or that I’ve lost my head in a cyber-fantasy, or I have downplayed the importance of speech which Derrida gives the position of primary importance (in accordance with philosophers such as Socrates and Plato – might I add)?

The thing is I am not denying the importance of ‘real-life’. In fact, I can hear the new sociologists on their horses, raising their swords and shouting that twitter- or cyber- reality cannot be disconnected to 3-dimensional reality, and the notion of the 3-dimension must be questioned, and the sensory experience of the cyber is a lot deeper than just visual etc. Yes, I can hear all of that. I agree with that, which is why I’d like to venture forward with my thoughts on cyber presence, not because I wish to offer a new perspective for the sake of offering a new perspective, but because I want to show what I’ve felt myself…

The wordbite ‘RIP Shebby’ was floating around on Twitter immediately after it was found that a boy from Birmingham called Shoaib Nadeem, 17 years old, committed suicide on 11^th June 2012. This was what he tweeted not too long before he died:

Ok, last ever tweet, man is going now, I wish you all a good life and erm… yeh just t.c. of yourselves #ShebbysLastEverTweet.

I never knew this boy, but I had seen my friend and others conversing with him before on Twitter, and that is why when the word flew round of his suicide it was quite a shock. It was not a shock simply because of the suicide in itself, but because of the sense of the presence he left behind in his tweets. You could look through his personal timeline to find his wordbites floating in cyberspace as if they had only just left his keyboard. The contrast between his presence within those words, and his death in real-life was what brought me to tears. Also I just want to add here because I don’t know when else I could add this; as I looked further into the news articles regarding his suicide, it made me for once feel like I could not outright condemn suicide as I had done so easily in the past. He fell from the top of a 100ft multi-storey car park which he’d been sitting on the edge of, looking down at the world. The moment between choosing to sustain your life, and pushing yourself off the edge was too close for me to definitively say he pushed himself off and didn’t slip. In fact, even if he did push himself off, it made me realise that sometimes the moment between life and death is much closer and therefore much more complicated than I could have ever realised. And so who defines at what moment exactly an individual decides to take that decision? He could easily have not been conscious of it in that split second. It may not have been a fully conscious decision. The movement of him pushing himself off is as numb as shifting a little in your seat, especially when the news articles stated that there were people on the street below shouting for him to jump. These are just my thoughts.

Anyway, as haunting as that was I realised that twitter had other relations to death and presence. There is a site called ‘Famous Last Tweets’ (http://www.thefamouslasttweets.com/) where I found among the collection the last tweet of Reeva Steenkamp before her murder (Oscar Pistorius case).

All deaths are significant, all presence is significant. But I don’t want to focus on celebrities in this insight. The wordbites form the presence of the individual and I’d like to put forth my view that this sensation is very different when in the case of an unknown individual, because, after all, celebrities are given a different kind of presence created by paparazzi and the media that many of us consume. The unknown individuals on Twitter give their wordbites to the machine and these are the only presence we know of those individuals. This does not make us feel as though we are missing out on the rest of their lives, actually it’s the opposite; it makes us see those wordbites as their life. And if we can connect to that individual on a personal basis, relate to what they’re saying, identify the things they’re tweeting about as things we know on an experiential level, and also if we can recognise and connect to the voice we give them, then we can perhaps feel the sense of their presence as someone we could, or may well, know. And with such wordbites the dynamics that occur have their own impact in terms of humanising someone who was previously unknown and who you cannot see in front of you.

And so I’d like to end this long ream of my own thoughts with this one controversial but, to me, important example. Jahar (Dzhokhar) Tsarnaev’s twitter timeline is that of a typical 19 year old. His wordbites give a sense of a presence which is largely consistent in his continual references to pop culture; movies, music, drugs. Not only this, but, in comparison to many individuals on Twitter his timeline is not actually completely filled with communication with others on Twitter. Mostly, he shares his thoughts (I’m going to use the present tense here because in the time of this writing his Twitter account is still open to look through). He shares a thought in the sense of it being thought and not in the sense of that thought being well-thought. He tells jokes, he talks about how many assignments he has left, he cannot decide whether or not he is lazy, he tweets here and there regarding something casually philosophical, and this ‘casually’ only adds to the vibe of thoughts being tweeted without being well-thought or thorough giving a feeling of the presence of someone thinking out loud while continuing to live life. His tweets are alive, and since reading about what has taken place after the Boston bombings in the news articles available in cyber reality, I can’t help but look at his timeline with that same sense of feeling haunted – except in that I have to keep reminding myself he is still alive (at the time of this writing). Because you see, his current condition and absence from being able to share his wordbites in cyber reality gives the sense of haunted-ness which I previously felt at the thought of someone having died. The haunted-ness comes not from the death of the person, but the overwhelming presence of the wordbites.

Whatever anyone has to say regarding his charges or whether or not the state finds him guilty, or whether or not you are sure of his guilt, or you are sure of his innocence, or you are in doubt, despite all of that, I only wish to make this point; when you can read the wordbites that are representative of a human-being, you can feel their presence. And if you can imagine them, it is much harder to remove yourself from them in order to dehumanise them, and you only need to look through his tweets (@J_Tsar) for evidence of this.

If we put this in the context of the discourse on Terrorism reliant on the threat of the Other, and the identity of the Other, we can see fragmentation occurring in Jahar’s example. The Islamophobia that always seems to surge – even without actual evidence of an extremist link – out of these incidents which are polluting the history of my generation is growing old very quickly. And the fact that many of us can’t define the concept of ‘identity’, or easily describe our own ‘identity’, does not weaken us from being able to see this, in fact it makes us question the basis of the differences we’ve been told to believe in, or the hard-line positions we previously held.