kafkascope on loss - lack??? duh!
…rather than memory loss, it was more a memory lack..
“there’s a big difference between loss and lack. I suppose it’s like – well, imagine a train steaming down a track. The freight’s disappeared from one of the cars. A car that’s empty inside – that’s loss. When the whole car has vanished –that’s lack.”
- Prof Tsukayama
(Kafka on the Shores by Haruki Murakami)
The lack vs loss debate is a little too convenient to swallow nonchalantly. In fact it’s not very agreeable or palatable. Mabbe the context in which Tsukayama explicitly explained the ‘loss’ as distinctly different from ‘lack’ is not rooted in the same context that I am applying to the incomprehensible reasoning unfolded by him.
According to the Prof, when the “whole” car is vanished - it’s LACK. When the car’s “empty” inside, it’s LOSS. Hmmm…When Moby sang “Why does my heart feel so bad” ..was he suffering from a lack or loss?? If my ‘context’ here is a ‘low-down empty soul-searching heart ’ – and if I were to apply Prof Tsukayama’s reasoning, an empty heart or heart searching for answers – it’s a loss! But if’ there is NO quest only – it’s a lack??? Something seems amiss here...
Sometime the quest of an empty heart is for something/ someone whose ‘absence’ in your life has a strong presence. And the inevitable denouement to that : revelation of feeling a certain, commonly known as “Lack”. Loss is something you experience after the presence of ‘lack’ is erased by physical and tangible presence of the object of affection in our lives and that person/thing makes a quick or prolonged exit from our lives. Only then can we comprehend and recognize "loss".
Lack and loss form a vicious circle. Like mentioned above, only once we recognize what’s lacking, and find the ‘absent factor’ and amend it with fruitful presence of a dear someone/something in our lives; do we recognize the loss that follows his/her exit from our lives. Simultaneously, sometimes invariably we get extremely comfortable with the 'presence of lack' in our lives that we don’t wish to trade it with the tangible presence of what we are actually lacking or subconsciously seeking. We refuse to accept the missing piece to complete the puzzle; the void becomes extremely comfortable. This intimacy with presence of lack in our lives becomes an extremely complacent and snug existence. The intrusion of a physical presence seems disturbing. And thus we remain cocooned...This translates into a loss – a loss of experience, a loss of hurting and hoping, a loss of experiencing sweet, nauseous, pleasurable pain. a loss of living belong illusion, a loss to challenge the real, a loss of knowing what real or literal destitution is all about.
“there’s a big difference between loss and lack. I suppose it’s like – well, imagine a train steaming down a track. The freight’s disappeared from one of the cars. A car that’s empty inside – that’s loss. When the whole car has vanished –that’s lack.”
- Prof Tsukayama
(Kafka on the Shores by Haruki Murakami)
The lack vs loss debate is a little too convenient to swallow nonchalantly. In fact it’s not very agreeable or palatable. Mabbe the context in which Tsukayama explicitly explained the ‘loss’ as distinctly different from ‘lack’ is not rooted in the same context that I am applying to the incomprehensible reasoning unfolded by him.
According to the Prof, when the “whole” car is vanished - it’s LACK. When the car’s “empty” inside, it’s LOSS. Hmmm…When Moby sang “Why does my heart feel so bad” ..was he suffering from a lack or loss?? If my ‘context’ here is a ‘low-down empty soul-searching heart ’ – and if I were to apply Prof Tsukayama’s reasoning, an empty heart or heart searching for answers – it’s a loss! But if’ there is NO quest only – it’s a lack??? Something seems amiss here...
Sometime the quest of an empty heart is for something/ someone whose ‘absence’ in your life has a strong presence. And the inevitable denouement to that : revelation of feeling a certain, commonly known as “Lack”. Loss is something you experience after the presence of ‘lack’ is erased by physical and tangible presence of the object of affection in our lives and that person/thing makes a quick or prolonged exit from our lives. Only then can we comprehend and recognize "loss".
Lack and loss form a vicious circle. Like mentioned above, only once we recognize what’s lacking, and find the ‘absent factor’ and amend it with fruitful presence of a dear someone/something in our lives; do we recognize the loss that follows his/her exit from our lives. Simultaneously, sometimes invariably we get extremely comfortable with the 'presence of lack' in our lives that we don’t wish to trade it with the tangible presence of what we are actually lacking or subconsciously seeking. We refuse to accept the missing piece to complete the puzzle; the void becomes extremely comfortable. This intimacy with presence of lack in our lives becomes an extremely complacent and snug existence. The intrusion of a physical presence seems disturbing. And thus we remain cocooned...This translates into a loss – a loss of experience, a loss of hurting and hoping, a loss of experiencing sweet, nauseous, pleasurable pain. a loss of living belong illusion, a loss to challenge the real, a loss of knowing what real or literal destitution is all about.
A couple of days back, a high-brow, savvy acquaintance of mine sincerely remarked – Why does shit happen. How do you fix it? How do you struggle with emotional baggage, fears and hopes? And why do we feed the same bullcrap to someone who’s trying to reach us and end up alienating them?
This is exactly the kind of circumstance when we nurse ‘lack’ into ‘loss’.
You are so absorbed with your hurt, pain, fears and hopes and wishing for the lack of the presence of the object of your affection (obviously you think it’s a loss that he/she is no longer in your life.). He/ She has exited – it’s a loss. But over a period of time, if you’re still grieving - it’s a lack – your lack of comprehension, your lack of vision, and your lack to cope-up with a break up. And thus you begin to feed and nurse this “lack”. You begin to feel vulnerable without the pain and hurt. You find it comforting to nest in the confines of your ‘emotional baggage’ that comprises of stale mourning, decaying, fading memories, bitter agony, sense of betrayal, bruised egos, and great deal of excruciating pain and hurt. In such a situation, a certain someone from the world you’ve reclined; extends a helping hand to retrieve you from the swampy hole you’ve laid buried in since your last ‘loss’. And you are obviously oblivious to the opportunity that walked to your door to restore the ‘lack’ in your depressing existence. You continue to mull and brew cotton-candy illusions about your abandoned muse. This is when your lack again turns into a loss!!! A major loss...you just lost out on the one person who cared enough to pay attention to you in your sullen state and was willing to help you move on without your baggage, to help you struggle with your fears and to help you render concrete form to your hopes and you blew it away like sand in your face. You’re a fool…serious fool!
Anyways, I’ve digressed from where I started. I started with a distate for Prof Tsukayama’s rigid expression of lack and loss, but maybe the context in which he used the above, he needed to be a little stringent about it. However, in real life loss and lack have a twisted and devious – a cause and effect reaction and existence in our lives. One leads to another, almost sinisterly and sometimes pleasantly. They are ambiguous and normally believed to have a very inconsequential part to play in our lives. Not really.
“Someone live my life
I’ve got to know what dead men know
Someone to love”
- Moby
(dead men knew no lack or loss)
I’ve got to know what dead men know
Someone to love”
- Moby
(dead men knew no lack or loss)
I can see
I can feel
Hate to see
Hate to feel
- AIC
posted by NEHA DUTTA at 7:05 AM
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