Facebook foible

To discover or invent the psychology of the pathology of the facebook I need words, but I wonder if I do really have them. I am getting close to saying I am at a loss for words.

If I were not in facebook, I would have savoured and used many words again. I don’t mean just words. Words are just a part of a grand design whose line drawing is a sentence.

I may have gone on writing in the paper on the same page the next day or the next year, but the page with my words would have just been there, hanging around like a loyal dog waiting for an uncaring master. I may have even let the poor dog die unfed and uncared, but I would not have caught it and flung onto the street, where its whimpers would have drowned in the chaotic traffic out there. Facebook  has made me merciless and cruel, more cruel than a child battering mother. I give birth to these words in their formative design, and without waiting for them to grow and grab other words and weave another branch or related words, I thrust them out into the harsh light of social media which scorches more than the sun in its peak of heat.

I am not lamenting at the premature death of so many poetic probabilities that were prematurely delivered and left to die, untreated and uncared at the reduced number of ‘likes’. Thank God they did not create a  clickable ‘dislike’ till this moment. I feel like the shameless and selfish mother who disowns her child because it does not beget her appreciation. I have let so many lovely angels decay before they grew their wings and turned rosy. My words are unfortunate to have been born in this facebook era. Had they been born in the days of paper and pen, they would have still been alive and around, and if perchance I see them in a new light, may have got resuscitated. Not these days; words flee from typing fingers onto the launch pad of a click button, and in seconds after their appearance, appear in front of all. Not the ‘ALL’, but the ‘all’ who I have considered my temporary all. And, not all look at these words. Some are not even aware that they have arrived, some do not care to give them a second look, a few ignore, and a few more refuse to acknowledge. The fresh sculpture soon finds a dustbin, and with the million tons of debris and rubbish that keep piling everyday it may never find an archaeologist, anytime in the farthest future.

Having wasted so many words I still keep collecting them. I still keep weaving them into a tapestry that I always imagine would surpass the shroud of Turin. But those golden threads have gone out of the window, and I have gilded copies which would soon fade and dim in the eyes and minds of whoever cares to even take them on for a look.

I pause, ponder and in defense pontificate, that words are just the outpouring of a perennial stream and there it would always be, the source of the stream, supplying for eternity.  I lie to myself and write- ‘Wordless in the wilderness of mind..’

It is not that words have flown away from my memory; it is just that they are looking back at my mind which flung them out. They look down and mock at times, at my foolish delusion that they would one day soar up above the world so high that they would twinkle and light a new path. They do look up at me with ineffable sorrow, to make me guilty that I have thrown a seed out before looking at the ground and its fertility. They pray to me, an incompetent creator, hoping that I would resurrect them or give another birth and a chance to do something worthwhile. They pretend to believe in me, and pretend to believe in the world outside of me.  I have thrown out many words. Every word I threw out was not a casual toss into oblivion; they were all pellets aimed at a goliath that I had not even sighted. I have thrown away many words, original words that glittered and glimmered in the illusory sentences that my mind elaborately designed in deceit. All those words are gone. My mind and its brain still have surplus stock of words, but many are just replicas of those original words which went flying out into a fathomless obscurity. Having had the delight and ecstasy of using the original word in its pristine form to make a virgin design, replicas make me sigh.

Lies again. Not the cunning, scheming, malicious and brutal lies that are generally evident; these are lies that smoothly sail out like a leaking perfume, and hover long enough to get noticed and vanish. They would by the time have made their impact. An impact that would not choke or scorch, but an impact that would slowly cloud the vision, temporarily but long enough to distract and alter the perspective. Depths would no more be deep enough….

NO..I cannot write lies to myself. I cannot take writing down to the level of a ‘selfie’. I have to save my words, whatever is left of them, for a hope in the dark future when I may have an opportunity to unhurriedly set a necklace uncaring whose neck it would adorn the next day.

Until then, I have to write lies, not for myself but for others.