Before television became liberally flattened, and overtly democratized by the Army in power (Musharraf’s regime), there were only two or three national channels we had. We didn’t have much of freedom of speech, so to speak. Nonetheless, there was something else: lack of euphoria. The televised images of love, therefore, were motionless, sieved by the conservative imagery. But, it was so beautiful, even more so in connection with the nostalgic evocations I have of the images, but just so beautiful with the lovers stilled by their love for each other. Endlessly, standing against the sun, they would gaze at each other, struck by what Blake calls the “lineaments of gratified desire”.
Of course, it is the ‘90s I am speaking of, which simultaneously wanted to re-imagine a newer cast of national characters, as well as push to desire for a degree of freedom away from the dark images that Gen. Zia had left behind through his Islamization project. Youth of Pakistan started to create very exceptional forms of music, singing about alienation (Milestones/Vital Signs), the need to reconnect with Sufi culture (Junoon), and exhibiting a certain kind of agency amiss otherwise (Jazba/The Trip/Praying Mantis), to name just a few musical bands I grew up listening. Other mature artists, writers, dancers and art directors, who had left the creative scene, came back to reinvent it.
I go back to these images to catch up on lost sleep, which the doctors tell us is a newer form of illness shaped by neo-liberal anxieties. You cannot, scientifically speaking, catch something like sleep; it is lost forever. We only succumb to inward gazing. It is a sedative hypnotic, inward gazing. And, images of stilled love without complexities are therapeutic, an anti-dote to capitalism’s perception-distorting machinery that dogmatically churns forms of mindlessness every hour of the clock, as Crary informs us.
Arshad Mahmoud gave music to the many plays I continue to watch, which still my heart many a nights. I am often woken up by a fit of anxiety, pressured by the temptation to work harder, to erase precarity, to clutch a root as I fall in a dream, and then lull myself back to a love-inscribed nebulousness with Mahmoud’s pulse-numbing music. So gratified I am that I know the alternative: eternal, still love, shaped like an embrace with the name of “hundred years of solitude”.
Solitude is a prescription of resistance, and it is a political tool. Imagine: by way of entering a collective form of solitude, we disappeared, even for a second, from our Facebooks and twitters, en masse; disappeared from the spaces rendered political, which the Occident uses as a form of surveillance to watch us. It would be like disappearing completely from within the walls of hegemonic cultural imperatives, spaces that are schizophrenic and claustrophobic. It would be an uprising of a profound making, salient in that it deconstructs the very programming of social media’s imagined power. They tell us, social media is the newer place to “practice” solidarity. We prove them wrong.
Solidarity is not to be practiced, as if it is a religion. Solidarity is to be lived. So, to register our protest we disappear, thereby arriving, in context, at the ontological position from where we create our own “social medium”, which lacks transmission of moth-eaten political sound bites, but gains from the palpable realities we live every day. Things we approach, we approach meticulously, in depth and meditation, becoming the anti-thesis of what we ought to become, the degenerates and wretched of the earth.
And, we feel, feel very still, unlike the caricatures of dread-ridden images we have become on those posters, distributed by the philanthropists, of African children gaping away from the vultures, and Muslim women looking for Hellenophilic civilizing. Lastly, we love with a lasting commitment, something we are told is an ancestral sin, and never fail at reciprocating it.
Image: Andrew Bobir