Born to Die

1971

This picture was taken from a room in Calcutta, at the place where my mother’s head rested while I was being delivered. It shows the roof of a Jewish dharamsala, a charitable lodge for travellers.

Unlike what is most popularly but not totally believed, life has no purpose, it is not intended, there is no reward, and nor is there a cycle of birth and rebirth. (Most often belief does not arise from intuition but is forced by superstition, lack of understanding of what life is, and threats or promises of punishment or reward.) 

The reality is that two chromosomes with compatible DNA accidentally combine and form rudimentary plant or animal or human life. As is its wont, all DNA material has a span through which it traverses before terminating or dying.

In a lighter vein, I tell people that the first thing on being born was that I cried because I did not want to be born. In actuality, crying upon birth is caused by the loss of the familiar environs of the womb, the proximate rhythms of the mother's heartbeat, and other not very glamorous arrays of sounds in the company of which you are ensconced.

I have somehow believed that if I did not want to be born, I had automatically forfeited in principle my right to create a life. I will never know if I am paying the price, or if I would have been less at loggerheads with the act of living, if I had had a child. At this stage in my life, it more rather than less, does not matter. What matters however, is that I have not wavered from my conviction: that I did not want to be born, that I did not and will not believe that life is cyclical or predestined, or mediates in its own destiny; that it is accidental and contingent, each contingency contingent upon another, ad infinitum.