I remember learning of cognition as a concept and, suddenly, finally, having, the language and the discourse to articulate some of my most repetitive thoughts — repetitive is defined, on the internet, as containing or characterised by repetition, especially when unnecessary or tiresome, that is not what I mean by repetitive thoughts.

“The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from the
house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came, even
before the time, and they stood with the fountain between them, the
spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fix
themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss.”

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.

I really did intend to write an essay on why it tires me to think of ‘leaving.’ It is a concept that has been significantly repetitive in shaping my recent thoughts. In many ways, this essay was to be a selfish foray into aestheticised emotional production as a way of simulating a sense of intimate expression — it will be that but one must always remember that words don’t go to waste, yes expression of any sort is always motivated by selfish reasons but all expression, especially in the age of the internet, is contributing to one discourse or another — somewhere, someone, might read this and learn absolutely nothing, but they would come out of it with some additional vocabulary of thought — they would have read a text and consumed the internal logic of the text — that logic might not necessarily have any consequential impact but will always have a formal and formulaic impression — that will fix itself upon the mind, one element in the grander wave of the incessantly dribbling fountain spout (it was broken).

Whenever I think of leaving, it tires me, the idea drains all energy out of me — if the joy of life is nothing but the capacity to function, to think and to translate those thoughts into consequential sequences that motivate action, leaving immediately effects an immense cognitive burden that renders that capacity inane — the mind and the consciousness are separate things, thinking is not always fruitful, and the joy of life must always be fruitful in that it would seek to connect the mind to the material — when the mind functions irregardless of material, one must be as close to being purely conscious — the closest one can come to an epistemological singularity — leaving drains the joy of life out of me.

Think how significant the loss of the pehlun, the chand ghadiya … jo azaad hai must be to the mind, that there is music that articulates the fear of leaving — aaj jaane ki zidd na karo. 

When I think of leaving, it isn’t that where I am leaving to, or that which is being left behind, what worries me, what tires me upon thinking about leaving — but the death of the fictions of the mind — you cannot grieve these deaths because though fictions die in reality, they never die in the mind — they become memory — the loss of these fictions can only be experienced, never understood or expressed, because the minute the mind understands these fictions in retrospect, nostalgia overbears — melancholy is not an emotion but a state of the mind — the death of fictions.

Cognitive sciences have taught us much about how the human mind works — when Daniel Kahneman talks about cognitive ease as an element of heuristics, in choice and decision making, it is these fictions that he is referring to — and nothing else. But as much as one might say that these are nothing but the ways in which the human mind works, what can one do when things fall apart — things fall apart, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world — things fall apart, things and I — we aren’t very far apart.