I am Idiot

 

Friends ask me now and then, why did I name my blog 'The Idiot'. 

'The Idiot is innocence'. It’s me remembering fondly, not bitterly the natural boyish innocence I had when I was a kid and the natural boyish innocence I lost and still choose to be The Idiot to my best every possible ways in my forties.

The night I spoke about Dostoevsky with friends, sleep refused to crawl my bed. I can jump on to bed and go to sleep in two to five minutes. For such a person, staying awake in bed for hours is unusual, but this was not entirely unexpected when I read Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky is not someone you discuss before bedtime and then peacefully count stars. His characters usually kill the stars, confess to it, argue about God, develop a fever and spend the remaining three hundred pages wondering whether the stars had forgiven them.

My mind moved between happiness and agitation.

One after another, Dostoevsky’s characters appeared within me like the first leaves of spring, gathered the colours of autumn, and fell. Some fell gracefully. Some demanded an explanation before falling. Some probably borrowed emotions from the other leaves.

I lay awake wondering.

If everything that exists reminds us of something absent, what is the meaning of the thing that remain before us?

If the journey from existence to nonexistence is filled with surprises, who is the friend walking ahead with a single candle lighting the path?

Dostoevsky?

or his idiot, Prince Myshkin?

I chose the Idiot.

These are the kinds of questions that appear after midnight. At eight in the morning, the same mind struggles to remember where it left the car keys.

I wanted to read Dostoevsky that night, but I could not decide which book.

Then, one day, clarity arrived without warning.

I would read The Idiot.

There was only one reason.

It was a two thousand years old Tamil poem by Kapilar that I had read on Jeyamohan’s , my favorite writer's website.

The gist of the poem goes like this, "A white cow stands beneath a thicket of pollening flowers. Red pollen falls over its body until it is covered in a new colour. When the cow returns with new colour, even its calf looks at it in confusion, unable to recognise its own mother.

When I was young, I too was an idiot.

Not stupid.

Not uninformed.

An idiot in the Myshkin sense. I didn't choose innocence like any other kid, the innocence chose me.

Thats the phase of my life, I believed affection did not require strategy. I spoke before checking whether the truth had been invited. I trusted happiness when it appeared. I believed that when people said, “Let us catch up sometime,” they were proposing an actual meeting.

Then life flowered over me.

Work, responsibility, friendship, failure, marriage, fatherhood, ambition, disappointment and experiences settled upon me like pollen.

They changed my colour.

Experience taught me important things.

It taught me that “quick meeting” is not a unit of time.

It taught me that “no offence” usually arrives just before the offence.

It taught me that an email beginning with “Just a gentle reminder” is neither gentle nor a reminder.

It taught me to read facial expressions, silences, agendas and the dangerous sentence, “Can I be completely honest with you?”

But experience did not destroy the person I had been. It never killed the boy in me who played cricket in the streets with stumps drawn with a piece of charcoal. I can only thank the supreme power for this blessing.

But It sure gave me better cover.

Sometimes I looked at myself inward with the bewilderment of the calf in Kapilar’s poem.

Not because I had become a stranger, but because I had become to handle.

The boy who trusted easily was still present.

So was the man who had learned caution.

One wanted to hug the world.

The other wanted to check the world’s credentials first.

I thought maturity was not the burial of innocence.

I thought it was allowing innocence to cross the road while experience looked both ways.

I did not want to return to my younger self. I am so happy with what life has offered me. I had no desire to erase what life had taught me. I only wanted to know whether wonder could survive knowledge.

So, by reading The Idiot, I spent a few days with Myshkin and find out.

My books sometimes organise my life without consulting me.

I obeyed.

As I read, I felt I was living in two worlds.

Each time I closed the book, I stepped out of Myshkin’s world and returned to mine.

In Myshkin’s world, a man could look at another person with complete compassion.

In my world, the calendar asked whether I had accepted the 9:30 meeting.

In Myshkin’s world, human suffering opened profound questions about love, beauty and redemption.

In my world, someone had replied to an email with “Thanks” and copied eleven unnecessary people.

Yet the two worlds slowly began to overlap.

Myshkin did not ask me to abandon intelligence or practical sense. He seemed to ask something simpler.

After learning how the world works, can you still look at it without contempt?

That question stayed with me.

Kindness is often mistaken for weakness because it does not advertise its strength.

Innocence is mistaken for ignorance because it does not display its calculations.

But Myshkin’s innocence was not emptiness.

It was fullness.

He saw people before deciding what they were worth.

This is more difficult than cleverness.

Cleverness sorts the world quickly. It identifies advantage, danger, power, usefulness and weakness. It places everyone into the correct folder.

Attention leaves the file open.

It waits.

It notices the person who does not fit the explanation.

As I continued reading, old memories changed their shapes. I began to find Myshkin everywhere, in strangers, children, birds, rocks, leaves and people I had previously classified too quickly.

One day, Myshkin appeared in my home theatre.

We were watching Sully, the film about the pilot who lands a damaged aircraft on the Hudson River and saves everyone on board.

When the plane landed safely, I clapped.

“Look,” I told myself. “What an extraordinary pilot. Not one passenger died.”

The boy inside me looked at me seriously.

“I am so sad,” he said. “What would have happened to all the fish in the river?”

I had counted the passengers.

He had counted the fish, lifes.

For one moment, I wanted to explain the nature of emergencies, the relative value of human life, the depth of the Hudson River and the probable survival rate of fish exposed to an unexpected Airbus, a jumbo commercial aircraft.

Fortunately, I stopped before turning wisdom into logic.

I laughed.

Not at him.

At the sudden widening of the story.

I had seen a river carrying an aeroplane.

He had seen a river carrying lives before the aeroplane arrived.

The heroism of the pilot did not become smaller because of the fish.

The world became larger because the boy in me had remembered them.

Child in us often notice what the main story leaves outside the frame.

Adult in us follow the plot.

Children ask about the background characters.

And innocence is not the inability to understand what is important.

Perhaps it is the refusal to believe that only one thing can matter at a time.

That’s the boyish innocence, The idiot I yearn to be.

Then came a sunny day.

For several months, I had been searching for a special textile edition of book Don Quixote .

I visited nearly forty bookshops before finding it.

This was not sensible behaviour for anyone.

The book contained the same words as other editions. It did not include a secret chapter in which Don Quixote became financially responsible. The cloth cover did not improve the plot.

Still, I wanted that edition.

When I finally held it, the happiness was difficult to explain. It did not feel like a purchase. It felt like lost child finding his mother back in a crowd. I literally felt that and almost cried of joy.

The next day, a group of colleagues went out for lunch.

One spoke about his second investment property.

Another described the cryptocurrency he had bought.

Someone spoke about his car.

Someone else spoke about his PlayStation.

Each person placed their happiness on the table.

Then it was my turn.

I told them about Don Quixote.

I described the cloth cover, the months of searching and the forty shops.

One person smiled.

One laughed.

Another asked why I had not simply ordered it online.

This was a reasonable question and therefore completely missed the point.

I explained that searching was part of the happiness.

He nodded in the polite manner of someone listening to a relative describe a dream.

For once, I did not feel embarrassed.

Why should one form of happiness require permission from another?

One person looks at a house and sees security.

Another looks at cryptocurrency and sees freedom.

Someone looks at a gaming console and sees a weekend.

I looked at a clothbound book about a man who fought windmills and saw companionship.

The world had enough room for all of us.

I know my beloved Don Quixote himself would have approved, though he might have challenged the investment property to a duel. I stood there as an Idiot but happily.

Brighton Beach is where I often walk.

A walk there brings back poems I have read. I do not know whether it is the wave, the sea, the shore, the large rocks or the foam gathering between the stones that awakens them.

One day, a rock reminded me of being the Idiot, The Innocence.

The waves approached it with force. Their faces tightened as they rose. They struck the rock and, at the moment of impact, opened into white foam.

The rock did not fight the sea.

It did not run away either, though rocks generally have limited options.

It remained where it was and changed the form of what struck it.

People often imagine kindness as surrender.

But the rock had not surrendered.

It had received force and returned beauty.

Anyone can return anger as anger. The supply chain is simple.

To receive anger and refuse to continue its journey requires imagination.

The rock lost something of itself with every wave. Yet the erosion did not look like defeat.

The rock entered the sea grain by grain.

The sea entered the rock as memory.

Nothing remained untouched.

Nothing remained separate.

That remained my people. The ones who returned kindness for anger. Who returned smile for arrogance. Who showered me with immense love for my silliness.

The highest point of poetry is the beauty it carries.

The unspoken word within the poem is the Idiot’s innocence.

The highest point of a bird is the sky.

A fragment of the sky is the Idiot’s innocence.

The height of reason is the place where reason loosens its grip.

One colour within that freedom is the Idiot’s innocence.

The height of peace is forgetting oneself.

The final question within that forgetting is the Idiot’s innocence.

To lose oneself in love, art, friendship or wonder is not always disappearance.

Sometimes it is the moment in which one becomes most present.

During the month I read The Idiot, stayed beside me like a friend who did not need conversation.

After that, I began to see him everywhere.

I saw him in Van Gogh, looking tenderly at a pair of discarded shoes and deciding they were still worthy of attention.

I saw him in the woman on the train, apologising for the carelessness of a stranger.

I saw him in my theatre, remembering fish in the middle of a human miracle.

I saw him in the parrots, rising together without collision.

In the rock, returning violence as foam.

In the leaf, allowing the wind to complete the sentence.

Soon my world became crowded with the Idiots.

This did not make me less practical.

I still went to work.

I attended meetings.

I defended ideas.

I disagreed with people.

I recognised drama.

I knew when to speak, when to remain silent and when to leave a room without announcing it.

Kindness did not require blindness.

Innocence did not require helplessness.

The Idiot's gift was not that he knew nothing of darkness.

His gift was that darkness did not become the only thing he could see.

That distinction mattered to me.

Experience can sharpen my life without hardening me.

Wisdom can create boundaries without constructing a wall.

A person can understand the calculations of the world without calculating every human encounter.

I know that this is the innocence available to adults.

Not innocence born from ignorance.

Innocence born from choice.

To know that people may disappoint us and still meet them without immediate suspicion.

To know that love does not always transform the receiver and still recognise what it does to the giver.

To understand that the world is imperfect and still allow oneself to be surprised by beauty.

To speak happily about a book even when others are speaking about houses.

To save the passengers and remember the fish.

To stand like the rock without becoming stone.

To fly among others without requiring them to fall.

To give attention where there is no profit.

To remain tender where politics is considered power.

To take seriously what others dismiss.

I know every age creates its own definition of foolishness.

In one age, it may be refusing wealth.

In another, refusing power.

I am not Prince Myshkin, the Idiot.

I do not wish to become him completely.

I value judgement.

I value experience.

I value the ability to recognise danger.

Not every door must remain open. Not every person must be invited inside. Some people should remain outside with a polite smile and no spare key.

But a house with every door locked and every window closed may be secure and still have no light.

So I leave one window open.

Enough for a sentence from a stranger.

Enough for the question of a child.

Enough for a wave to become foam.

The pollen of experience has changed my colour, but it has not hidden me from myself.

The calf looks up.

The cow looks back.

There is recognition.

When I was young, I was an idiot because I did not know the world.

Now I am an idiot because I know it and still enjoy being surprised by it.

I know that kindness may be misunderstood, still I choose it whenever I can.

I know that wonder is not efficient, still I make time for it.

I know that books cannot compete with investment properties in market value.

I still search forty shops for one lovable book.

I know that saving passengers is heroic.

I also remember the fish.

I know the wave will return.

I stand beside the rock and watch it bloom into foam.

This is not innocence regained.

Nothing has been lost.

This is innocence grown older, wearing glasses, carrying experience and occasionally checking the calendar for meetings.

It knows the world better now.

And it still thinks the world is beautiful.

The world may call such chosen innocence as an idiot but choose anyway. 

You will lose many. You will be judged.

But

You can sleep well.

Be an Idiot!