This and That

And yet again, I start my Booker prize winning novel and leave it in the lurch. It was supposed to be part-autobiographical, inspired from the fact that my life these days is beginning to resemble uncomfortably many of the movies I've seen. So I wondered if I could make some money/fame out of it. Realized, yet again, that real life needs magnificent prose for it to become a page-turner. And I seemed to have lost the flair for that. Events in my life that seem too incredible to document become cliches when expressed in the mundane language I am used to writing in. I wish my writing had the lyrical quality of Gorky or Maugham. I am the 'walking, roaming' example of the idiom 'Fact is stranger than fiction' and I don't have the talent to preserve the talse for posterity. A tragedy.

A couple of days back, the bacchas and I were talking about what we would write in the books penned by each of us. I reiterated my usual balderdash about human nature, relationships, psychology, philosophy, the nature of life, the universe and everything. Prattle's framework went on the same lines, except that he wanted to make his a sort of mongraph. I pointed out that people like him and me ought to start off with a definite plot in mind and then weave our pet ideas into it. Otherwise, it is most likely that we get sucked into one idea or time frame in the tale which winds around us, sucking us in whirlpool-like, and kills the rest of the book.

We talked about parallel universes and astral travel and I came up with a theory on how the out-of-body experience might not be a figment of someone's imagination after all. I remembered this book I'd read long ago and pooh-poohed then, 'A bridge across forever', in which people travel across the various universes that are created depending on the decisions they make. I like to think of a hierarchy of levels, like floors on a mall, with each of them hosting an intricate network of paths, intersecting, forking, joining... the various combinations of the multiple decisions that we make in our lives. Each level represents a universe, holding various possibilities of lives within a life. Which universe we are in is decided when something that isn't tge body, sould or mind is in limbo, like somewhere between being conceived and being born, and that entity can choose any of the parallel levels to land on. So when people talk of out-of-body experiences, they could be talking about instants when they dissociate something very vital to our existence from our bodies, place it in virtual limbo, allow it to land on a parallel universe and experience it in that instant. Well, I leave it to your imagination the chemicals that weer acting on my system during this exchange.