I Have Lived a Thousand Years*: (A Journal or an Experiment in Living)

* The title is taken from Livia Bitton-Jackson's memoir, 'I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust'. The title had a strange hold over me even without reading the actual work for a long time. I have come to believe that it is because of two reasons- it says to me something of what I feel regarding the role of fantasies in my life as well as the change that accompanies them in my reality. It captures the nature of the feeling of change when it happens- when one feels it in oneself. It also captures something of how my fantasies, where I live another life in constant dialogue with the conscious and unconscious impacts of my reality, adapt to those changes. The feeling of change and the mutating fantasy lives that accompany them, is that it makes events and memories from even a few months ago, seem like a lifetime ago. Language and its inadequate parameters for real time are never able to capture the feeling of a yawning gap between what we were and what we have become. Even if it is a few months, it feels like a lifetime- it feels like a thousand years worth of change packed within a restricted time frame, making the transformation seem more and more catastrophic. This journal is a collection of many years of such changes, my thousand years of life captured and fixed in words that could best describe them when they happened. It is my attempt at and an experiment in finding my solitude, my language, a language that I speak best, a language that speaks me...a language of and for the questions and quarrels that promise to keep me endlessly puzzled for a long time and hence, make my life livable in its elusive moments of sheer joy as well as its overbearing loneliness.

"Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavor. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought."
-Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own
1. Small and big things in the day that make me happy, soothe me, absorb me, get me interested and my resistances to ‘being myself’. Conversely, small and big things during the day that make me deeply upset or simply feel weird/numb/indifferent/angry/sad/ and so on and so forth.

2. A chronicle also of my suffering that comes from relating with other people- loving them, hating them, tolerating them, losing them, gaining them and in that process gaining and losing myself constantly into other people and in relation to the world at large, to the ‘wide focus’- treading the contingent boundaries of ‘personal’ and ‘political’ in the free-floating existence of the ‘self’. Also, a chronicle of what/who I want in moments as well as what/who I might want to be.

3. Mindful and sometimes free-associating articulations of random states of being during the day, sometimes as attempted analysis for conclusion and at others, as mere observation (playing hide & seek with elusive and powerful thought trails especially while daydreaming and immediately, but very carefully putting them in writing so it does not lose its power from conscious attention to it). Keeping track of 'butterflies', 'intruders', 'rabbits' and 'elephants', 'mice', 'cats', 'dogs' and so on in varying depths to understand the potential set of reasons behind a state of mind, an action, an emotion and what to possibly do about it, where it might lead me to, and what its unique roles and importance might be in my psyche. Catching real intentions and immediately yet very carefully fixing them in words.

4. Vignettes of philosophical moorings on the human condition, fiction, non-fiction, history, music, art, cinema, photographs and literature that I read/see/listen that move me, intrigue me or frustrate me and so on

5. Any thought that compels me to sit up and start writing in the stream of consciousness and the stream of unconsciousness. What are my habits? What do I like and dislike and what do I love?

6. My habitual resistances to the pleasures of the creative process (experiments with ‘not being able to’), moments of my real pleasure in creativity during the day, the development of my own practice.

What is a sense of my own real, sustainable sense of my own self- secure and strong in its own pleasure and chaos and its solely authentic and contingent individual purposes in life? Will a sense of what my version of psychoanalysis (as also creative practice) might look like, arrive in conjunction to all else in my life?

“ A terror of something about love, and a terror about what the loss of love exposes.” -Adam Phillips, On Wanting to Change
This experiment, is a gift of love and my “long career of vicarious suffering” as George Eliot’s narrator in The Mill on the Floss writes of the heroine Maggie Tulliver’s Fetish (the doll in the attic that she would punish “for all her misfortunes”- the doll that was Aunt Glegg). Its point however, is to lose its point at some point in the indefinite future and become something very different from what it begins as for until life is there, the incurable self will still be searching for a more and more authentic version of itself.

"Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator (c.1873-1876)

THE NEUROTICS OF BECOMING

“I want to write impressions, aphorisms, essays and letters. Many many of them. I want to write them until the words that I write begin to lose their older meanings and begin to acquire new dimensions and colours, hitherto unknown, unthought (something Psychoanalysis will be about). I want to write until the dawn of a new world, a world of language pushed to its limits, twisted, turned and pushed until broken, broken until transformed out of its tyrannies, transformed until it fuses into life and opens it up at both ends. This is my genuine insistence, my way to freedom of a different kind, this is my life-work. My way to freedom is through the act of honest remembering, honest reproducing.”

– Journal Entry, 10/02/2022

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7