Taki 183

IT MAY NOT BE CLEAR WHEN, but at some point, a certain kind of woman becomes too involved with food. The daily, mundane process of fuelling one’s body is suddenly not sufficient for her. She seeks something from it that goes beyond ordinary nourish­ment. She experiments with it, trying new places, new cuisines. Her Instagram algorithm throws new reels at her, created by food in­fluencers, from all corners of the city, and from elsewhere, too. In her conversations she brings this up, saying: “Oh there is this amazing place in Mysuru!”—a city from where she could be a thousand miles away. Her appetite for not only food, but for conversations about food, borders on the grotesque. This culinary immanence in her life becomes more pronounced to a man who is at the same point in life as hers, but his gaze at the world borders on withdrawal. He eats less, gives up on weekend binges, and considers buying an Enfield on which to escape to Ladakh.

This is of course a generali­sation, but it is true for a kind. It usually happens after one be­gins to feel spectral inside. And the exigency, in a way, of this ghostliness, occurs when one feels one’s life thus far has been akin to a ponzi scheme. The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg used to call this condition tiredness of “having to become oneself”. It could happen any time, but it particularly happens around this time of the year. Something is turning, and the enthusiasm for food (or for a physical escape) is a protuberance of this void inside.

Why does this happen? It happens because, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han reminds us, we have become an achievement society, where we are a “late-modern achievement-subject” whose maxims are freedom, pleasure, and inclination, and who expects the “profits of enjoyment from work”. When the void appears, we start looking for vitality, something different from what to our hearts has begun to feel like simple impotence. It is then that we are seen on the road on the first, or second, day of January, moving our arms with momentum. This is our new-year resolution, to become fitter. It is an attempt to change our life. By December-end, the PPT testosterone has begun to run low with a realisation that this year too has come to an end, and how quickly. Which in other words means that we are slowly moving towards death, that the philosopher Todd May calls the wall between us and forever. With our office access cards around our necks we promise each other (that is a promise more to oneself) that from next year we will do things differently, break the pattern of our lives. Entering a new year is like entering Penn Station like that commuter who, as WH Auden said, vows that “I will be true to my wife, I’ll concentrate on my work.” Then the commuter gets into the train and spots the sewer rat. And that ends it. The covenant is broken; we are off the road, yet again. How many restaurants will we try? The akrasia has overwhelmed us again. The pattern is unbroken; life goes on, till a point it does not.

Sometime in the late 1960s, a schoolboy in Manhattan begins to write Taki 183 (his name and street number) on any surface he can. This soon becomes a rage. This was a teenager’s attempt to leave something behind to withstand his own mortality

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But how easily we brush that aside. Does it feel, for example, that just a few months ago the entire world was going through the biggest crisis that will per­haps occur in our lifetime? The paranoia of touching a surface, the double masks, the polyethylene coats made to hug each other without the contact of flesh, the goodbyes on iPads. And now: nothing. How we keep pushing, removing the shadow of death even as it keeps lurking, not going anywhere, really. All around us young men are collapsing suddenly and dying. It is attributed to things around Covid—the havoc it has wreaked on our bodies, or even the vaccine we took to prevent the severity of it. Maybe it is that. But then also it is so much more. No mat­ter what we do, no matter how many Excel sheets we maintain and how many planners we keep, we never seem to reach anywhere. We had devised our lives in a different way. We had hoped to do what Han calls becoming “entrepreneurs of themselves”. We may have become that, but at what cost? We are tired, as Han says, not of each other, but with each other. Our life is a black hole, a hungry mon­ster that needs all our time and then some more. The leitmotif of our lives is the dreaded OTP. The other day a friend who lives in a gated apartment complex in Gurugram was raging about how many “Sir, your parcel has come from Amazon” calls does he have to entertain each day and how many apps he has had to down­load. Technology is a constant, undeniable presence in the life of the modern man, but if we think it is giving us pleasure, why is it that some of us are hankering after short takes on social media by psychologists like Nicole LePera or Esther Perel? And why is our neighbourhood bookshop’s self-help bookshelf overflowing? If the idea (of psycho-analysis) was to restore the capacity for pleasure, as Theodor Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, then why are we still unhappy? It is because we see the shadow of our actions and then like the mythical groundhog it delays the oncoming of spring. We created workspaces that are hostile to life; we live in homes that are a city in themselves. But as the philosopher David Kishik reminds us, a city within a city is only an “anti-city”. And our endless assurance to our­selves, that Adorno calls “champagne jollity”, ends up in a hangover the next day.

There is no way we are learning to live, till it becomes late. The cities around us are collapsing; we are blind mice on our personal ferry wheels, without any attempt at looking inwards. We have friends who succumb to the idea of marriage because they don’t want to die alone in old age. There is a comfort in knowing that someone will be with you when you die. But that does not take away the loneliness of death.

IN EARLY 2004, TODD MAY TAKES A FLIGHT FROM SOUTH Carolina to New York to meet, what looks like the last time, his step-grand­mother who is dying of cancer. As the plane ascends, it suddenly seems as if it is flying directly into the Empire State Building. May remembers how every­thing in the cabin becomes suddenly quiet. This is less than three years after 9/11, and everyone fears the worst. May feels as if this is the end of his life. Nothing happens, though. It is only that a small plane has landed at the airport, forcing May’s aircraft to take a detour. But May says that he can never forget those few minutes. Because, as he ruminates later, there is no “we” in the moment death approaches us. It is something that Roland Barthes also is aware of. A day after his mother’s death on October 25, 1977, Barthes begins a “mourning diary”. On October 27, he writes about thinking of mother in the next room. “For the first time in two days, the acceptable notion of my own death.” Five days later, another entry notes: “That this death fails to destroy me altogether means that I want to live wildly, madly, and that therefore the fear of my own death is always there, not displaced by a single inch.” Back home, the actor Jackie Shroff said this in perhaps a much more moving way than Barthes. In an interview with broadcast journalist Irfan, he doled out the advice of keeping one’s merudand (spine) straight, which is his way of saying that we must live a life of moral excellence, like Aristotle wanted us to. In the same interview he laments the death of his mother with whom he lived in a single room in his younger days. And then with success came walls. And one night, she is in her room and passes away alone, while her son and presumably others are just across the wall, or two walls. Real estate, as Kishik reminds us, has very little to do with real life.

We have friends who succumb to the idea of marriage because they don’t want to die alone in old age. There is a comfort in knowing that someone will be with you when you die. But that does not take away the loneliness of death

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But what is real life, anyway? It is not a question that can be addressed in a year-end issue. But is it a pursuit of happiness? When we say we are tired, does that mean life itself is tiring us? Is it our constant endeavour to chase something that saps us? Bertrand Russell believed that the struggle for life is nothing but struggle for success. In his essay, ‘The Successful Day’, Peter Handke asks us: “Do you see a distinction between a happy day and a successful one?”

Sometime in the late 1960s, a schoolboy in Manhattan begins to write Taki 183 (his name and street number) on any surface he can. This soon becomes a rage, and many teenagers begin to emulate him. Soon, New York public places were filled with Taki imitators like Yank 135 and Joe 136. In an in­terview to the New York Times in 1971, Taki said he didn’t feel like a celebrity. “But the guys make me feel like one they introduce me to someone. ‘This is him,’ they say.” HIM. This in a way was a teenager’s attempt to leave some­thing behind, a legacy, a trace of himself that would withstand his own mortality. It is very unlikely he was thinking in these terms, but then this has been a man’s deep mapping inside that long after he takes a transatlantic flight to nothingness, something of him remains in the physical realm. The wall in Pompeii is one such flare sent out to say, hello, we existed. Ev­ery photograph, every line we share on social media is in a way a calling to that deep mapping inside us.

So what is the life-graffiti we must leave behind? Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “What is the aboriginal Self, on which a uni­versal reliance may be grounded?” In a way Nietzsche tells us in The Antichrist what it could be to live a life sans common vulgarity that he says is due to an inability to resist a stimulus. The writer Italo Calvino advocated a “thoughtful lightness”, which is not to be confused with the internet sensation Orry say­ing he is a liver (someone who “lives”).

The anthropologist Michael Taussig is in a restaurant in America and gets asked by a waiter if he is still “working” on his food. It makes him wonder about the mean­ing of life. That itself brings us back to where we began. Perhaps then it is best to remember how the philosopher Gillian Rose ends her power­ful lecture in 1994 on time and death with the Rilke sonnet: ‘Be ahead of all departure’. At this moment, she has less than a year to live, her body being consumed by cancer. It makes sense. Because being ahead also means that the semiotic of language is rendered meaningless by us as we always take one step in advance. Remember that line in the theme song of Friends: I will be there for you. And then keep in mind that Chandler Bing was found dead alone in a hot tub.

About The Author

Rahul Pandita

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