Sunday, November 29, 2009

When All Chains Are Lost

To most people anything black is grave. Its represents misfortune, ill-being and eventually Death. Over time, through this superstition, everything black or even remotely dark came to be considered a bad omen. Persian cats, ravens, black clothes (ever wondered why we wear only those to funerals?) and even something as beautiful and divine as the night. Most people forget that black is derived from the mixture of all possible colours in the world, whereas white, the symbol of purity and goodness is the absence of any colour at all, a void. Every argument taken up on the lines of the absurd reasoning this superstition follows ends up with the same conclusion every single time. Black represents Death. Even if we were to consider the whole concept of a colour representing a particular thing or emotion (which again is illogical! Why exactly do you need a colour to represent your feelings, let alone your end is beyond me. If you have to express something, you say what you are feeling not what colour it is that you’re feeling!), black still wouldn’t fit the bill. Allow me to explain, red represents anger, yellow represents happiness, purple represents melancholy and so on. When a person dies, the most prevailing feeling (unless that person was Stalin) is sadness. Now if we were to follow the “colour representing feeling” theory, sadness is usually represented by blue. So essentially, Death should be represented by the colour blue, right? It’s too late to change these notions now. Most people experience limitless fear and anxiety from the colour itself. By the time they reach the part where they can get scared of what the colour represents, they have either reached a state of heightened paranoia or have sought refuge in their mind’s little cookie-and-milk land where nothing’s black, not even night.
They say life is all about conquering your fears. Then why not start with the biggest one? If people were to think about Death even for a moment, spare a few minutes to decipher why they are so immensely afraid, they might realise that it is not a frightening concept at all. Death is nothing except ceasing to exist in the same space-time continuum as ours. If they are troubled about all the things that they are going to miss after they are gone, well… they are dead anyway. What does it matter what they miss? Presuming that after Death a person ceases to see, feel, smell, taste, hear and everything else that a human body is capable of experiencing, then what is entire hubbub about? Your emotions won’t exist either, hence you won’t experience fear, sadness, longing, anxiety, angst, misery or any other feelings that we associate with Death. Sure you will deal with a lot of pain at first, but that would be the final bout of pain you’ll ever experience. If you think you’ll regret that pain was the last thing you felt, you won’t. If you are incapable of feeling anything at all after your Death, then that bout of pain would be the last thing you would ever feel because you were alive when you felt it. You wouldn’t remember anything you felt after it; indeed you wouldn’t remember anything before it as well, since your memory shall forever be erased. In any case, what use would it be, if you can’t express your emotion-filled reactions to the incidents lodged in your memory? If you were to think on this line of reasoning, that Death allows you to feel nothing at all; no pain, no sadness, no misery, no happiness, no pleasure, nothing; then isn’t Death in effect better than life? You might invite immeasurable pity from others for thinking this way. However, pity is an emotion, which (as mentioned earlier) will not exist after Death.
On the other hand, there might be a potential flaw in this theory. People. Not the ones who die, but the ones close to them. They would feel miserable when someone they love dies as they would not have that person in their lives anymore. However, if they would be a little less self-centred and not think about the repercussions that the person’s Death would have on their lives but instead think about how the dead person is finally, in the true sense of the term, free; they wouldn’t feel so ‘sad’.
The chronic aversion to Death that people suffer from can get quite frustrating to anyone who thinks like I do. In the end, you feel like all people should die, just to get the whole thing done and over with. Nevertheless, after the frustration mildly subsides and slightly more humane emotions take over, you feel that instead of killing everyone, it would be best if you were to die. Then realisation dawns; anyway you look at it, Death will always be the answer to life. The ultimate answer to the eternal question.Now, if only I could tell this to the rest of the world without being ostracized by the entire human race for being the spawn of Satan.

2 comments:

  1. I love this piece. I grew up making black my weapon of choice throughout my adolescence and perhaps it is because of its ill-fatedness that I chose to empower myself with it. I'll be forwarding you a lovely piece on the colour that I read a couple of months ago. I think you'll find resonance.

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