The First Chapter II

And then there are those day, days without written progress of thought. My room has the ability change meaning with my own occupation in it. On days when I come home late, tired and exhausted from the hectic schedule of the day, it’s nothing more than a dark room paid little attention to till the morning sun rises and shines bright in my eyes, waking me up to spend just a few minutes of awake time before I head out again.

I take the only staircase in my building downwards and into the open clearing in front of my apartment. There, is no natural landscape. There is no natural. There is no landscape. Since the past few weeks, I had been intending to work on a thesis proposal without actually being able to actively do something about it. There was a ‘plan’ I had in mind. The plan constituted of a transformation of my room, bringing in material for model making and converting all the walls into space where I could scribble with markers and pens. I was trying to set up the room to create an environment ‘healthy’ enough for thought to flourish. It didn’t happen that way.

What did happen was a book. More specifically it was a book on a bus on my way to work and back. It’s not exactly what was in the book and I say that because sometimes I didn’t have to read the book at all. Sometimes all it took was to take it out of my bag, open the bookmarked page and the rest came with staring out of the window. Ideas would flash before me. Recollection of thoughts would take me to places of their origin while I would miss the bus stops I was physically passing by. ‘Defence Mor’ , ‘R.A. Bazaar’ and ‘Liberty Gol Chakkar’ it seemed were not on my route. I was somewhere else. To be specific, I was in my third year design studio, discussing ideas with my teachers. Then I passed by the corner of me lying on my lounge sofa inside my house in Karachi watching a documentary on TV. Afterwards there seemed to have been a prolonged stopover at the road that led through the valley of Neelum in Kashmir.

That last destination could actually be the equivalent of having lost my orientation and needed the timely intervention of a passenger getting up from the seat beside me to bring me back to physical space and make me realize the bus is actually about to reach the Gulberg ’Main Market’ stop. I wonder then, have I changed assigned meaning of the space around me? Or has the space adapted to me?

Later in the day I reach home early to pen down my thoughts. As I stare into the darkness for a while, I set off to typing down the disjointed ideas running in my head. Soon the ideas make some relevant sense and are the beginnings of conceiving an initial abstract. Have I changed the character of my room without any physical intervention?

The argument lies as much in physical form as it does in our mental ability to both perceive and project. Here when I talk about perceiving, I mean not the input of information that our sensory receptors receive, but how they react to it. An over sensitive ear will hear things more sharply and will think of sound as more defined compared to someone with weak hearing. Over time we are all then molded into defining what is normal for us. Such conditioning would overlap itself constantly, so all new information is received in relative terms. And then there is the projection. The relative reality we are all bound to experience. 

The First Chapter

As the engine of a motorcycle is kicked into ignition, I hear it gasp loudly and repeatedly in loud “put put’s” trying to breathe in the sparks in order to get its motor into a mechanical rhythm. You can hear the rider negotiating with his machine to oblige by gently but increasingly testing its throttle. From behind me, I suddenly hear footsteps clamouring their way up the staircase of my apartment building. The short yet striking clap of each footstep indicates the climber is jumping his way up the flight of stairs, possibly skipping a stair as he rushes up.

From my bedroom window on the third floor, I can see the roofs of other buildings in the neighborhood. Behind their silhouette, an orange hue rises up from the horizon into the deep dark night sky. Then, occasionally as if only to break the stillness, a distant car passing by throws in light stenciled through my balcony railing into my room as rectilinear shapes which continuously morph as they quickly run across the walls and ceiling. I’ve kept the lights turned off in my room as I usually do whenever I sit or lie down to write on my laptop.  Basically then there’s just the light emitting out from my laptop screen with me staring right back at it. It’s blinding in this darkness, and when I look away from the screen it’s blindingly dark. However if I give my eyes a few moments to adjust, I can make out the brighter darks of the white walls from the darker darks of the doors, closets and chairs.

Cozily lying down on my bed, I notice how my hands and arms, which happen to be out of the blanket which covers the rest of my body, feel warmer than my toes buried deep into the fold of the warm cotton filled fabric, and colder still when I rub them together. And then there’s something odd about the silence. It rings into my ears. It rings the same way it has been ringing for over a decade now. I find it amusing because I only hear it when there’s nothing to hear. I once went to a doctor for it when it had becoming too annoying. After some tests he concluded it was psychological, nevertheless prescribed me medicines usually used for the treatment of vertigo. Many years on, I’ve come to passively ignore it now, but every now and then when its dark and silent and I’m wide awake, it gives me a bell, and more so in my left ear.

Then there are my thoughts. I can’t always think well enough to write well enough. I’ve tried randomly quite a number of times only to have regretted the attempt. It’s not so much about writers block as much as it is about a writers push. Many a times you need witnessed inspiration to act as a seed from which a derived idea will sprout out to see the light of day. Other times you need that dark empty nothingness to stare into, to be teased into trying something dramatic, and only to be further enticed by the bright white of an empty Word Document with constant back and forth glances into the darkness for imaginative visual references.

It’s amazing to notice the number of details you normally do away with yet, in my current state of writing, have helped me in realizing an appropriate way to start my text. It after all, is my sense of space, which is exactly what I want to carry forward.

Though I could only hear the actions of the motorcyclist, I could still deduce the mechanical detail of the struggle. Since I could notice the growth in the texture and amplitude of sound nearing my singular top floor apartment, I could very easily anticipate my main door being unlocked and opened by my housemate before the event actually took place.  Despite there being a blackout in my immediate vicinity, the hue across the skyline indicated that the outage isn’t widespread, and that most of the city enjoys what presently we Pakistani’s see as the rare luxury of electrification. More so the crystal glow of the shapes of light racing across my room points a finger towards a person who abuses his choice for luxury by installing HID head lights for his vehicle which to all encompassing commuters is an abomination during the night; Similar to how irritatingly impossible navigating my room without injury through complete darkness might have been if a contrast wasn’t created due to the reflection of a dim source of light off my white bedroom walls and not off wooden surfaces.

Alternatively, the fact that with a constant body temperature, my sense of warmth and coldness act inversely in corresponding environments could describe how apparent ideas could prove to be untrue, and how the apparent ringing I hear is actually bogus, proves that in the end, what we might sense isn’t always reality, so what should stop us from projecting our own hallucinations into the darkness, for us to visualize our dreams, even while we are awake.

No. I am not only looking for how the space around us affects our senses, but more so, I’d like to explore how our senses affect the reality of space we inhabit.