Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Of Poetry & Subconscious Motivations

I have been writing poetry for about 8 years now. To this day I have been unable to understand what drives me to write the kind of stuff I do. I know about the love poems I write which you will see here soon, but the rest of the stuff is beyond me. The pictures I see in my minds eye are not from my life or any life I know. It is as if someone put them there. Someone I have never known and probably will never meet.

There are times that at three in the morning I rise from a troubled attempt to sleep and discover a line running through my head. I rush to pick up a piece of paper and write it down and then my pen starts moving further and lo and behold, half an hour later I have filled three sheets of paper of words and emotions that have never belonged to me. I see visions of horror, sorrow, love and happiness, insanity, death and loneliness. What brings these to my mind? From where do they come? I hope I never find out. A single word can trigger these things off.

There have been times when my mother looks at me with a worried expression and asks me what made me write something so morbid. Am I unhappy? Am I angry about something? My answer is invariably, "I don't know". My grandmother once told me, "You have a perfectly happy family but you write as if you come from a broken home." To that I replied, "I don't know why"

One theory I thought of recently is that everyone is connected through a "collective unconscious", a theory not new to this world. This collective unconscious ties us in with every other living soul on this planet. It has the power to foretell the future, as in ESP and may also be the reason for intuition, friendship, love and empathy. It is not uncommon in animals to have natural instinct to help them survive from the moment they are born. We have been softened over the eons of evolutions to these instincts but they are still within us.

What about the feeling that someone is watching you? What about that feeling of knowing what another person is going to say next. What about "I have a bad feeling about this"? What about GOD?

God is, to me, nothing but faith. It is a collective thought so powerful that it brings people together and tears them apart at the same time. He drives people to survive and He drives people to their deaths. Could not the collective unconscious make things happen if it wanted to? Is that what "miracles" are? Could some of us be more aware of this than others? What about fortune tellers who are uncannily right about everything in your life? What about me? Could my thoughts and dreams and poems be a result of someone else's thoughts inadvertently being perceived in my mind driving me to try and rationalize them by writing them down?

Could it be the source for the "Force" that George Lucas made famous in the Star Wars Epic? Visions, enlightenment, ideas, inspiration, intuition, religion, God. Could all these be the interpretations of minds becoming aware of the collective unconscious, or rather, the collective conscious?

If so...How do you explain ghosts?

4 comments:

Arushi Nayar said...

So, where did all the subconscious motivations go??... i am hoping to read more... u haven't written for quite some time...

Swapnil said...

dude...if Freud was alive...he'd have kissed you.....its so true. iv alwasy felt writing to be the window into the un-concious/sub-concious. it generall dsnt have much to wid ur "concious" existence. now tht uv mentioned it, i plan to rip this article of urs and present it to my profs in kolj for their comments. dnt wrry, ull get ur credits...im not gonna use ur wrs as mine :p...

Abhijit Chanda said...

thank you that means a lot, man

sindu said...

hey.. absolute empathy with this piece of writing.. you know..i too kinda become a somebody-else when i start writing.. n once in a while.. when i try reading them.. it feels so sureal..'have i written it' kind of a feel.. though i didnt quiet get the hang of 'collective unconcious' thing... but.. big thumbs up and a bow..(i mean i cant rack my brains enough to leave a comment on each writing.. so this is a comment for all that i have read.. )