HOW NOT TO MISS THE 'MISSING' IN THE UNIVERSE AROUND US

[Anirban Kumar]

(Fig. i)*

Smolded through ages, as a lifeless form

Colorful but yet chaotic

Born but yet symbiotic

Caged in green lush, as a unique uniform

At the stroke of creator's fulgaration

Morbid smolder of chalk pours

Over the meadow of mountain in scores

As if planted in time, through curator’s dilation

Lets take an example. On the bus route (Flixbus) from Berlin to Venice near northern Italy, there is a stretch of mountain range. One can recognize it as “mountain-like”. In effect this recognition involves an act of identification which is to see the stretch of mountain range as “mountain-like”. And without an aorta of doubt the process of recognition, or that of naming, conspicuously incorporates all the elements of cognition, sensorium, sense, referent, and everyother concept that has an associative principle with recognition.

Herein, when the naming of mountain as a mountain is carried out in terms of a classification or a recognition, an identification which can be linked with an acknowledgement of missing rocks that might open up a moment of ‘decision’. And how is this decision approached ? François Laruelle argues that philosophy contends itself by giving a prescription by means of “an auto-position which is titular” to ascertain an a priori in the first place (2013, 4). A statement like, “that the missing constitutes the real,” then does have to be taken as a rhetoric, just by the sheer logic of rhetoric itself. The ‘decision’ to constitute the very performance of missing coming-into-being is absolutely to extrapolate the very nature of the ‘whole’, which if not said, misses the idea of the ‘whole’. Now there can be a seeming juxtaposition of the ‘whole’ and the ‘part’ or even the topical conundrum of surface vis-à-vis depth.

At this point its needed to zero-down on the ‘like-ness’ of a structure akin to that of a mountain. One can opine that a mountain is made up of many small rocks and which are indispensable to the whole of what we identify as a mountain, as a single unit.ⁱ These mountains also have green trees covering the outer layer. But can we say that a mountain is made up of trees !!? The anwser might inflect a prompt – may be the mountains are made up of trees instead of rocks. If this is the answer then a person is cancelling out the ‘knowledge’ that these “rock-like” stones are the building block of a mountain. But if the answer is seriously vouching for trees then a moment of pause demands to think over the response, precisely because a consideration of ‘one-ness’ which puts a rock and a tree at the same pedastal of life-form instills an imagination of the missing present in both.

The aforementioned ‘common-ness’ between a rock and a tree is explicated through two performative figures – obfuscator and dabbler. A rock professes a function like an obfuscator who impedes and withholds an information, whereas a tree imbibes the carefree attitude of an amateur who follows her passion without being called a ‘professional’. On one hand, through the gesture of an obfuscator, a visual extension of grandeur invokes halting scale of the mountain. And on the other hand, a dabbler proposes a communication between ‘oneself’ and ‘one-ness’ by breathing life into the ecosystem. Therein, a dabbler’s communication is felt at a level more affectively than the prescriptive conflation of an obfuscator, this mediation of ‘oneself’ with ‘one-ness’ carries forward an extrapolative commitment in a communicative manner. The dabbler communicatesⁱⁱ not with a transcendental self but finds a ‘technique in method’ of her own to be in sync with-though time.

Although the necessity of fulfilment in mediation ensure an encounter of the ‘self’ with the feeling, a dabbler contests and struggles against the ‘feeling’ of necessity and prunes it in a verbose way. As the dabbler lops off the contestation generated from feeling, it positions the periphery as excess to the barks of the stem on which it sits. The posture of dabbler sitting on this extension of stems, gradually develops a mannerism, while performing the act of pruning. But when a strong wind blows from all around, the dabbler has no cover. It runs for the dead branches at the ground. While under the shed of makeshift cover, the dabbler goes through a moment of ehsās-bodh wherein this moment of impasse presents a gift in the form of a gale within. It hears to the noise of this gale carefully without the need of grace being conferred upon.

Therein, a dabbler is least bothered by the dispensation around but has a unique sense of ehsās-bodh. A dabbler’s ehsās has a moment of realisation that the missing pervades the whole of mountain and thereby revises a relationship with delimitation. Because an acknowledgement of missing then have both, a recognition and identification at the same time. And therefore in order to follow through the simultaneous movement, dabbler’s method involves a technique at the same time. It comes out as an interjection “aahhaa”. The dabbler’s expression of ‘aahhaa’ simultaneously register one note of contemplative realisation, while at the same time listens to revelation by appreciating this ehsās-bodh. It vibrates all the way from within and says the most crucial aspect about everything happening in the present world. As there appears to be an encounter with a revelatory information, a singular moment in epiphany conditions the ehsās-bodh that there can be a possibility of novelty in store to come. Although an insatiable separation in registering and listening does initiate a paradox of realisation, the predicament of novelty propel a dimension of concealment in the courtship of epiphany. This paradox of realisation as a separate entity is replete of missing energy which is as present as it is in its absence.

An active and participatory traversal in this moment of realization/illumination proffer a unique characteristic to the medium, i.e. the medium becomes a mediator. It is like a transmission through the membrane of an eardrum that makes a covenant with sound in air, without being internecine (mutually destructive) to the world of vibrations that it creates. As much as the membrane qualifies for the tarīkā of converting sound in air, its forte rests with the conviviality of amplification. Because the hospitable quality has already inculcated a maneuver of listening to imperception, the exhalation is meant to stabilize the variation in pressure. Once the stabilization is incurred in the process of expounding a synergetic level in hearing, the cross hyperventilation runs with-through a spasm like situation, technically. In return the influence it creates is a permeable exasperation which allows listening to ‘the voice from within’. This puts the amplification in a position of transience, wherein the volume of breathing is listening to its rate of palpitation. The contraction though stems out as something which can exhume an antipathy for exasperation, but the uniqueness of this lafz ‘aahhaa’ calibrates the medium to become a mediator.

All at once, a diptych opens up – one side registers the dabbler’s experience of what she has done while cutting off the branches and second side, scrolls down an awry instance of realization that simultaneously glances over her experience. Since the diptych ungoverns a procedural norm of experience, the realization expressed as ‘aahhaa’, attempts to process the problem of commonality in between the noise of the gale and that which sways her off the ground from a knowledge system. Knowing the method of process, the two distinct registers acknowledge, what ought to be in the courtship of acquired determination. The rarity in epiphany involves a simultaneous innovation, its significance in the manner of ‘commonness’ in realising the gale, initiate a sublative predicate rather than substitution. The common gale gets off the mark and originate in the the dabbler by exuding a ‘rumbling from within’ and that too without a necessary self loathing. Because otherwise it can muster up only one thing, a self accusatory imposition of sin being benevolently bestowed as an orientation by default. So the dabbler has an answer in the form of ehsās-bodh who rectifies the image of gale by creating a real gale that virtually exists both in the dabbler and the obfuscator.

The question is not to only keep on brooding that why there is a dichotomy of ‘part’/‘whole’ or ‘surface’/‘depth’ but in order to think of the wholeness, one CAN think of a partness. Part is not the missing element of the ‘whole’, instead missing is the ‘whole’ which is common to both the ‘whole’ and the ‘part’ to say the least. Missing is the force, the vibration, the dark energy that holds the partness of the rock at the quantum level and the wholeness of the mountain with “co-relation” to any part of the rock. This holds true not only in the case of mountains on Earth but also as a paradox within the logic of the Universe. A “co-relation” of the part with that of the ‘whole’ and vice-versa is not a circumventing finite-ness instead, the realness of the Universe.ⁱⁱⁱ

* Fig. (i) Near Northern Italy to Venice, 2 Aug 2016.

NOTES

i  In the modern discipline of Geology there are many theories about the formation and of how mountains came into being. The study of rocks, sedimentation and mountain ranges have been an area of focus for Naturalists right from the days of Leonardo da Vinci. It was none other than da Vinci himself who drew out starkling inferences from his careful observation of the marine fossils found on the mountains of Parma and Piacenza. He inferred that “parts of earth’s crust had collased into large subtarranean cavities filled with water. The displaced water would itself push other parts of the crust up” (David Bressan, (2015) “How Geologists Determined The Way That Mountains Formed”)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2015/09/29/how-geologists..., accessed August 23, 2019.

ii Etymology Dictionary Online, s.v. “Communication,” accessed September 13, 2017, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=communication.

Saṃpreṣaṇ means to get across a word, idea or emotion. The closest term used as a translated expression in English for saṃpreṣaṇ is communication. Although the word has an etymological commonality with 'सं' and ‘Co’, both of them differ in their respective application, when put to in the means of derivation. Because the logic of derivation is what makes them stand affront to each other. The word 'सं' adds to the form of the medium which transmits the sense of what needs to be communicated. Therefore, it simultaneously issues a nominative and accusative characteristics to the formulation of appendage in 'सं'. Whereas, ‘Co’ initiates the combination onto a “noun of action from past participles stem of communicare (French)” which means, to make common.

iii  G.W. Leibnitz, “Reflection on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit 1702,” Philosophical Papers and Letters, Vol. 2, Second Edition Second Print (ed. & trans.) Leroy E. Loemker, (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 558.