What is Fuel

FMS#356 || Faridabad-NCR || February 2018

I heard a sermon.

Since when have you started listening to sermons! You’re always saying, “Everyone’s a thinker, no sermon necessary.”

I still hold that view. But this sermon emerged in a context and about questions that were both poignant and significant. So, in that moment, I softened my stance.

What a turn! Do elaborate.

A crowd had gathered. It was near the railway crossing. Word was, three young men had died, cut on the train track. They were crossing after their shift. The crowd was restless. Everyone crosses these tracks daily. It was as if everyone felt the loss of a limb.

Then?

One young man was speaking. He had everyone engrossed. He kept stuttering on the word ‘cut’. There was a trembling in his voice. His words were considered, as if he had tested many of them, chiseled his language.

You seem to have been very moved both by the milieu and the persona. Sermon is your shorthand for what you felt.

You may be right. But it did seem sermons held a sway on his manner of speaking. He dwelled upon, elaborated and multiplied the word ‘cut’ from and into so many directions that everyone became distraught.

We use the word ‘cut’ often between us.

And he was aware of that. Bodies get dismembered. Humans are hostile to nature. Hands sever from bodies. Childhood shrinks from minds, and compassion withdraws from intelligence. Life resources are dwindled from lives. Humans separate from humans. Humans become antagonistic to machines.

Wow, it’s like everyone would have encountered the force of their own cuts.

And even though I’m sitting so far away, I can sense the power of cuts just from your narration.

That’s probably why we are drawn to thought that extends and enlarges us in moments of difficulty and peril, makes us dig our heels in, sends thought coursing through bodies without differentiating between them.

Something like that. The pain of a cut, the hope of departure, the anxiety of estrangement, the desire for an opening, the anger of exclusion, the joy of an epiphany — everything was cooking in the cauldron. And the fuel? Say?

What was it?

Well let me try! Land was divided. People and land were sundered. Took a train, turned away from the village.

Still, what is the fuel? Descriptions are important. They are in abundance with everyone. Every description is also a description of the fuel.

People have been going from here to elsewhere for hundreds of years. The songs of parting from the beloved and songs of ships rocking at sea stitch the fabric of life.

So are you saying musicality is fuel?

Well, you’ve hijacked my line of thinking! But this direction too is intriguing. It seems there is no one fuel.

Some fuels march in procession. Some fuels burn. Some fuels flow subterraneously like molten lava.

And lava that surges unpredictably like your thoughts? What is that called?

I’m in search of a name, my friend. I’m in search of its name. Once I have it, it will dislodge settled forms. It’s just that I haven’t found its name yet. I experience it, can give a description of it, I sense it, feel it coursing, recognise its resonance, can mark it in different acts.

Let’s keep searching, thinking, talking, dear seismologist.

FMS 356 - 06. Feb. 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd